Why would you think they will spend in it the future if they didn’t spend it now?
They literally had as many or more needs than any team and there isn’t a spot on the field they clearly or significantly improved. Had they used the resources they had and it wasn’t enough then you can’t do it all at once would apply, but they pretty much did nothing.
If your conclusion is they gave up on this season I agree but they didn’t have to.
Well the main reason is that the rules dictate they spend a certain % of cap over a multi year period. I don't recall the exact amounts but they're actually prohibited from not spending money to this extent. They're going to HAVE to spend it in the future, a good chunk at least.
But beyond that, they made what I consider to be pretty serious runs at Ridley and Aiyuk financially. So it seems to me they're more concerned with significant improvement than marginal. This really isn't that uncommon though. There's always a few teams that start the offseason with some stupid amount of cap space like we're going to next year and usually it's because they roll over a ton. This isn't unusual for a terrible team to do this.
I really didn't like the WR options other than who they went for - Ridley and Aiyuk. There were some other good players, but all in the Kendrick Bourne caliber. For a team that isn't realistically going to be good this year, I don't mind not cluttering the depth chart with a bunch of those types. Darnell Mooney was a guy I've always liked and think maybe I'd have taken a chance on, but I imagine he'd have had us pretty low on his list so we'd had to pay a steeper price than he got from ATL. So I get it. Same for any WR really. I think they made the right move keeping Bourne for stability, going with a low cost guy that fell through the cracks like Osborn, and then young guys. They wisely made runs at Ridley and Aiyuk, but those guys didn't want to be here.
At OT, I never liked Tyron Smith. He's a short term, injury prone guy. He doesn't make sense for a team like us. We need stability and reliability. If he comes in and gets hurt we're in the same spot we are now. Jonah Williams made sense to me as a stop gap RT, but the truth is he's probably someone we'd all want replaced in a year or two anyway and he got a lot of money for that. I probably would have still bit the bullet and overpaid just to have some semblance of NFL caliber talent, so that's my biggest criticism.
I really didn't think much of the offensive FA class this year. I thought there were some really intriguing options on defense. I'd like to have seen them being more aggressive on that side of the ball, because that's where the good options were. But, I'm also ok with rolling the cap space to try and make bigger offers to the offensive players that spring lose too. Because we'll need to overpay to land guys.
At the end of the day, it's going to be a multi year effort to rebuild. I think even you'd acknowledge that. So I just don't want to get caught up in evaluating a multi year plan after year 1. That's not fair.
