I don’t care about this and am unmoved by it. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s been explained many times that when you decide to actually sign a few larger outside FA’s in addition to filling depth, you’re going to have large individual year cash outlays just to fill the roster when you rely on so many 1-year deals season-over-season. I don’t accept it as a “yeah but” in comparison to the actual cap usage game (and the techniques the most competitive franchises use to manipulate it) that the league plays.
It does not move me. I didn’t ask Harris & Co. to buy this team if they couldn’t afford the cash outlay, I don’t care that they’re spending $2-3B on the stadium to increase the worth of their own investment, even though it’s cool. It’s their job, it’s their investment, and it is as self-serving as anything else. I didn’t ask someone who owns multiple other sports teams with their own large cash expenditures to buy ours, I just hope for the best and judge his ownership from my seat as a fan.
I like Harris so far and what he’s about, as far as anyone can like a billionaire who says the right things and stays out of obvious controversy. But I don’t care about his finances or consider his liquidity to be my problem or area of interest. He wanted to take on the honorable burden of stewarding this franchise (his paraphrased words) and he obviously wanted to make a lot of money long-term owning this franchise, as a businessman. He got a lot of other investors and money behind him to do it, and they want their dividends as well, I get it. He really needs to figure out how to do things at an elite level or he’s not going to be a popular owner when it’s all said and done.
The yearly cash expenditure on the roster is not my concern (and as has been argued many times, is not an accurate way to represent actual resource allocation and strategy vs. peers) and is not a mitigating factor for any of my criticisms.
Harris will have every opportunity to be considered an elite owner but he won’t ever be if his operation doesn’t eventually rival the best/most competitive/most effectively-aggressive year to year. I’m not expecting miracles or even to be #1 in everything, if the process is good over time. I’m just not accepting of the excuses when I see the cap space we’re allowed to spend under the rules not being utilized, in favor of prioritizing a self-imposed cash cap that will never benefit the fanbase.
And it’s just math, as the cap grows every dollar not spent is worth proportionally less tomorrow than it is today, as contracts for the same level of players inflate and the cap is always growing. So rolling over copious amounts of cap to prepare for the contract we hope Daniels will earn, instead of making damn sure he earns it by spending more of it now, is not even the most efficient use of the cap. You want responsible leadership that takes the future into account of course, but you also want leadership that will strike when the iron is hot and spend whatever it takes when it makes sense (one of those times is when your QB is on a rookie contract, everyone knows that). Otherwise what is even the point of having some of these unethically wealthy dickheads spend their money on sports teams for our entertainment, if we still have to watch them solely prioritize their number-go-up god and can’t even get a Super Bowl out of the damn deal.
 }})
