Originally Posted by
Steve
I don’t think there was ever any doubt he wouldn’t play this year - we were just stalling until it got late enough that we could point to another niggle and say that was it (but still not look like we were tanking).
All the media talk is about his back-ended contract being a burden or mistake given he’s not playing, but has anyone else thought like me that paying him so much at the end of his deal has actually worked out perfectly for us?
I’m sure it wasn’t planned as such, but paying him so much when we’re in a rebuilding phase from 2019-2021 means we kept a better team together from 2014-2018 when we were contenders.
From the beginning I always thought that we were basically paying him $10m for 7 years (2014-2020), and only spread it over 9 years with back-ending for salary cap and list management considerations.
So he has been worth the average of $1.4m per year from 2014-2020, if we did it that way.
And even now paying $2.5m across 2021-2022 (and less, albeit proportionally to a lower salary cap due to COVID) will be done with a young list which won’t be causing us salary cap issues.
The only thing we can’t do now is front-end some contracts now while we’re rebuilding to save cap space for later, but for the sake of having Franklin in his prime for so many years it more than offsets that.
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