Quote:
Originally Posted by htismaqe
The damn contract is the worst part of it, unfortunately
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Yes and no.
Weirdly, Veach was pretty far ahead of the curve for the price-tags on off-ball linebackers. They jumped exponentially almost immediately after Hitchens deal. There was some potential for that to actually be a really nice contract for the team with some surplus value there.
And even where it is, if he could just be an average player, the contract wouldn't be a real boat anchor.
The bar for that contract to be fairly forgettable isn't really THAT high, especially since the structure made the first two years quite cheap (so forward paying a bit on the deal through the rollovers). When you consider the cap credits created through rollovers rather than any individual cap year, his average cap hit over the first 4 years will be right at $8 million.
That's a little high for an average off-ball backer, but it's not something we'd care about if the guy was playing at, say, Marvcus Patton's level.
The contract isn't REALLY the problem - the damn level of performance is. He just absolutely HAS to be better than this.