Should the NFL abandon its IR rule?

[plk]

It does give him an advantage, because BB chooses to not put everything into the top 5 or 10 players, while leaving the rest for scrap.

The more players on a roster, the more depth teams have, ie the less valuable each roster spot is. This makes managing players easier, and overcoming bad signings easier as well. Since BB seems to be better at managing players than most, a larger roster would lessen the advantage he gets from this.

You are probably right because BB does not seem to want a larger roster size.

But I still don't really understand it. I would think that a deeper team would have better players at the bottom of the roster and thus more to lose than a top-heavy team that has only easily replaceable players at the bottom.

One good example of the "use them or lose them " result from the current roster size is Danny Woodhead. With a larger roster size, he might be buried on the depth chart in New York rather than a star here. In that case, the roster size worked in our favor.

 

[BradyFTW!]

I've thought about this quite a bit over the past few years, and this is the system that I would adopt:

1) Leave the current IR rules as they are. For legitimately season-ending injuries, it works fine.
2) Create 3 spots for a mini-IR. At any given time, only 3 players may be on this list, so the spots are at a premium, and it's probably not a good idea to use them for anything other than their intended purpose.
3) When a player is placed on the mini-IR, he must miss at least 6 weeks of games. He can miss more, if needed, but for all of the time that he's on the mini-IR, one of the three spots is tied up.
4) Players cannot be moved from the mini-IR to the full IR until a certain amount of time has passed (maybe all 6 weeks, maybe 3-4 for if it becomes apparent that they aren't healing quickly).
5) If you cut a player who is on the mini-IR, his spot remains taken until it would have opened up had he not been cut.

Because you only have 3 spots, rules #4 and #5 create a significant disincentive for stashing healthy players there. Imagine that it's week 3, for example, and you've tied up all three of your spots on developmental draft picks. Your star QB gets hurt, and because nobody's eligible to come off of the mini-IR (either to the active roster or the full IR), you don't have a mini-IR spot available for him. As a result, you're either IRing him immediately or carrying dead weight on your roster for 3 weeks. Best case scenario is that you carry the QB for 3 weeks on your roster, then in week 6 you cut one of the mini-IR guys and put the QB there in his place. In that case, I would say that the system has worked as intended.

Imagine how much that would have helped us last year; Bodden and Ty Warren, for starters, might have been able to come in and help us down the stretch, and we might have had Gostkowski back as well.