To be clear, I'm not advocating signing AP. What I'm saying is that by the sound of your philosophy on signing and paying elite talent, you should be banging the table for AP. But your not. AP is guaranteed a spot in the HoF and is the best running back on the market. And for all practical purposes we can go and get him.
Well, there's your problem. You don't understand my philosophy. I think top tier DTs that provide interior pressure are incredibly valuable and important. Doesn't mean I want to go out and use our limited cap space on Suh.
My philosophy is to KEEP OUR TALENT. I don't go banging the table to overpay every good/great player in free agency.
For all practical purposes, we CANNOT go and get him. You inventing a scenario where the Rams have to sacrifice other assets to sign Peterson is not PRACTICAL. If the Rams were swimming in cap room like the Jaguars, sure, pay the man. But we have limited money available. And we need to budget intelligently for next year to keep our homegrown talent.
There's nothing practical about signing Peterson.
But you don't want to and that seems to contradict what said about "If I find a great one, I'm keeping him". AP is great, shouldn't command the money Suh will and will almost definitely have a greater effect on the game. He is a relative bargain in comparison.
Keyword is "keep". Meaning that I already had him.
Don't make excuses here. Your logic applies just as much to Peterson as Suh. Do you not think DTs are valuable and worth paying if you're not willing to drop everything to sign Suh? We both know the answer to the question.
My reason for not grabbing AP is because you don't sink a lot of money into the RB position which is what
@CGI_Ram was saying initially. And yours seems to be that you do pay for the RB unless you can't afford him (Like you claim the Rams can't). My point is that "can't afford him" rarely actually exists in the NFL. The only team that legitimately can't sign AP right are the Saints. Moving money around a little bit can free up some cap. Your claim falls flat at that point and we are pretty much back to not spending that much money on the RB position.
Well, I think your reasoning is poor.
My point is that you don't sign FAs that you can't afford. You keep your own homegrown talent and then you use the money you have for free agency intelligently. Which rarely means spending big unless you've got a ton of cap room. If you have a great HB, you pay the man. Because it's worth it.
I'll state again that the HB position has the second biggest impact on team success of any position except QB. Look at Adrian Peterson and the Vikings in 2012 for an example of that. Peterson was the difference in at least 5 wins that year. Without him, the Vikings would have been a bad football team rather than a 10 win playoff team. Look at the 2009 Titans, Chris Johnson was the difference between that team picking in the top 5 and them winning 8 games.
The on the field impact of a great/elite HB cannot be questioned. If you have one, you pay him.
My claim does not fall flat because you invented an impractical scenario where the Rams could sign Adrian Peterson if they sacrificed future cap flexibility and cut an important player like Chris Long or Bradford. That's exactly the opposite of any philosophy I have. Spending big money in FA that we don't have while getting rid of homegrown talent.
But since you don't want to do it for Suh, you don't think DTs are valuable...right? Come on, answer the question. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You don't get to claim that I don't value HBs if I don't want to create room we don't have for Peterson and then not apply the same logic to signing Suh.
"Can't afford him" often exists in the NFL. Teams foolishly choosing to create space they don't have is how you end up like the Saints.
Go ahead and dispute any of the logic I've put forward on the impact of HBs or dispute that your same logic applies to a DT like Suh. If anything, you're getting top tier HBs at a discount because the position has been devalued which is even more incentive to keep them.
A guy like Adrian Peterson will make a far bigger impact on your team than a Calvin Johnson or a Larry Fitzgerald and he'll do it for $1.5 to $2 million less per year. Hell, consider this...Jamaal Charles is the third highest paid HB but would be the 13th highest paid WR. Is anyone really going to tell me that there are 13 WRs in the NFL that have a larger impact on the game than Jamaal Charles?
If anything, it's more economical to pay a top tier HB than it is to pay a top tier WR...especially when you consider the fact that top tier HBs have greater impacts. And yet nobody here is trying to claim that you don't pay WRs. Same goes for a top tier HB vs. a top tier LT or a top tier HB vs. a top tier CB.
