The largest numbers of dubious contracts at the door of the free NFL agency were not hard to find on Sunday, with the New Orleans Saints signing quarterback Taysom Hill for an exaggerated – but totally canceled – $ 140 million four-year contract extension. The keywords in this sentence: Totally canceling.
In most cases of NFL contracts, this phrase translates into numbers as being “totally meaningless”. In terms of what the extension implies, this is not one of those cases.
There are several important signs of the Hill extension.
What is real about the $ 140 million Taysom Hill extension?
First of all, the numbers: the entire $ 140 million span is not a real number. It is a mechanism used to stretch Hill’s current salary cap and decrease how much he counts this year. If you paid attention last week in the NFL, you’re familiar with teams that close new deals with players and use nullable years to basically move their money into the future when there is more limit space available, a maneuver that has become necessary this year, when the 2021 salary cap dropped to $ 182.5 million due to the drop in revenue related to the pandemic. All you need to know about Hill’s deal is that the extension years are nil at the end of the 2021 season, which means that he officially has a one-year contract
The math: Hill had a cap of $ 16.159 million, which has now been reduced to $ 8.41 million, saving $ 7.749 million for the Saints at this season’s limit. This savings means that a $ 7.749 million cap that will not count this year will be pushed to 2022 – unless Hill signs a new extension.
All of this is important for two reasons. First, Hill still counts a lot against the limit, even if it extends over two years, which should be an indication that Santos still sees him as his potential starting defender in 2021 and beyond. And secondly, the fact that he will count against next season’s internationalization, whether he is on the team or not, should indicate some motivation on the part of Santos to start working on an extension throughout the 2021 season if he starts as a defender. and plays well.
Is Jameis Winston still a factor in New Orleans?
Hill not only appears to be in the running to replace retired Drew Brees next season, but his money and contract structure already suggest that he is the favorite for the job, especially considering the team has not yet hired Jameis. Winston. This does not mean that Winston will not be part of a second quarterback run for the Saints in 2021. It just makes it clear that New Orleans wants Hill to be part of this derby and that his remaining limit load already puts him in an “initial” Layer.
As for Winston contributing to this image, a source close to the quarterback told Yahoo Sports on Sunday night that he wants to stay in New Orleans and sees Saints and coach Sean Payton as his ideal situation for getting an initial job, not to mention a long-term business. If that happens, it will eventually boil down to another team unexpectedly offering Winston a starting job in 2021, which seems highly unlikely. The most likely scenario is Winston making a deal by paying him a low base salary with strong incentives to increase his earnings if he gets his initial job in a prolific season. The problem is that Winston could get the same kind of business elsewhere, too, although he did not have the same year of familiarity as he already has in New Orleans.
Don’t expect Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson to become candidates
Basically, New Orleans seems to be going straight to the point where we all suspect in the case of Brees’s retirement: with a quarterback competition between Hill and Winston, but with Hill being the initial leader only in the 2021 salary implications. In a situation ideally, the Saints would see one of these players prove worthy of a long-term extension, which would be triggered at the end of the 2021 season, with the Saints being able to use the franchise brand to block Hill or Winston if such an extension cannot be achieved.
Lost in all this is the evaporation of the “fantasy” scenario that would never happen, which would have seen the Saints swapping for both Seattle Seahawks ‘Russell Wilson and Houston Texans’ Deshaun Watson. Not only would the Saints essentially have to destroy their list or dramatically hammer out the final years to make such a subscription happen, the franchise would also have to forgo considerable assets that would have included some essential parts of the current list.
The extension related to Hill’s cap kills any scene of this event, which is another considerable signal sent by a phantom extension that made a lot of noise, but in fact just whispered the same quarterback scenario that we had been waiting for all along.
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