Bucs Fifth-Biggest Spenders In NFL
August 5th, 2012
Holy Manchester United! Bite your shameful Glazers-are-cheap tongues.
ESPN.com’s team of statistical gremlins has dissected NFL player payrolls and determined that the Buccaneers are slated to pay the fifth-biggest salary totals to players this season.
It seems the Bucs’ rollover cap room from 2011 is being used.
The Bucs have $130.8 million of cap space committed to their top 51 players (only the top 51 cap figures count until the regular season begins). That’s well over the $121 million salary cap, but the Bucs are allowed to spend over the cap because they carried over room from last season. They actually still have $15.232 million in available cap space because their cap is just over $146 million.
Click through above to read more of the spreadsheet details.
Cue the legions of Bucs fans that believe Raheem Morris got a raw deal when it came to purchasing talent. Joe never quite got that argument. The collective quit in the team and the complete collapse last season had nothing to do with payroll.
August 5th, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Misleading figure: although true, the team front loaded (which is not unusual) the recent FA contracts which will distort the cap figure in year 1. It will flatten out in years 2 and 3, and unless the add more big contracts, I.e. Free they will move back down next year.
August 5th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
^^LMAO^^
August 5th, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Glazers have been awesome owners…they have done alot for the community and fans !
August 5th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
I would like to see how they fare over the last 3 or 4 years. Bet they wouldn’t be in the top 16.
August 5th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
It’s not misleading at all.
The Bucs WILL be paying the fifth-biggest salary totals to players THIS season. Period.
August 5th, 2012 at 1:08 pm
Happy that our bucs were big spenders this offseason. Cant wait to see what our new players do for us this year.
August 5th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Mo money mo betta!
August 5th, 2012 at 2:20 pm
I love it, we spent a bunch of money, have a sizable emergency fund, and should have more cap space next year.
August 5th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
That sound of thunder you hear outside is actually Eric’s head exploding.
August 5th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Little Timmy:
You can’t say that yet. If they cut bigger contracts: like benn, trueblood, black that would knock them down.
August 5th, 2012 at 4:00 pm
It’s not misleading because it specifically states this year. There is no talk of the future
August 5th, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Why don’t we sign a FA DE? Andre Carter?
August 5th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Joe why does it always seem you kiss dum dums a$$? Cue the bucs fans who felt rah got shafted? You know damn well he got shafted. They didnt get A++ free agents and you know it. It was build through youth and raid another teams practice squad players. You telling me thats the same as the top three we got this year? Come on joe. You are getting me to the point where i can barely read your site anymore.
You know darn well they didn’t spend money and dont say cause free agents weren’t out there. Cause they were. You are killing me joe !!
August 5th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
LOL! Man I love to see Thomas squirm in a post. Sorry Tommy…..the money don’t lie.
August 5th, 2012 at 5:57 pm
SteveK,
Let me offer a little info that might help you decide whether or not you still want the Bucs to go after Andre Carter.
Carter is 33 years old with a torn quadriceps that literally “popped off the bone” according to the Boston Herald. He had 10 sacks in 14 games on a 1yr contract with the Pats.
Carter has been declaring himself fit since mid June. Not only has he not re-signed with the Pats, he acknowledges that he has not even heard from the Pats and as you know TC is well underway. Neither has he heard from any other NFL teams.
Now you know that Schiano and Belichick are best buds and they talk and you also know that nobody leaves a 10 sack DE on the shelf unless there are reasons. I think we should wait until we see what we’ve got at DE in a game or two before we do a deal we may be sorry about later!
August 5th, 2012 at 5:58 pm
@evo – Whether they spent money or not, the team quit on Raheem. No amount of money could have fixed that.
August 5th, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Derrick Harvey and Anthony Adams should be on Dom’s radar. The former gator and 1st round pick Harvey was released yesterday.
August 5th, 2012 at 6:10 pm
@Evo….listen, you just came off of a 10-6 season and your philosophy is to build through the draft. Why would you go out and bring in a bunch of FA’s who may mess up the chemistry of the team? Remember, you just missed the playoffs in a tie breaker. You think you’re only going to be better the next year and you are committed to the draft. Hind sight is always 20-20 but at the time I would have to say that I didn’t see any reason to be a big player in FA. They started the season last year at 4-2 and beat the Saints and the Falcons. Then the wheels fell off. Easy to say the Morris got shafted by no big FA signings but I don’t care who the coach is, if the team goes 10-6 no GM is going to go out and spend a fortune on FA’s. Why would you??
This year was different. When others were saying the Glazers were cheap and wouldn’t spend in FA I was saying they would go out and get 2-3 big names and that would be it. Turns out they did just that but they needed to this year. Like I said, it’s always easy to look at the past and say what should have been done but just because money isn’t spent doesn’t make you cheap. You only spend money if the situation warrants it and after a 10-6 season I think you wait it out and see how things go the following year. FA’s or not, the team quit on Morris…period. HE let that happen by being way to tolerant of sloppiness. Schiano is a different type of coach and I believe he’ll have more success. I liked Morris. Unlike others, I don’t believe you go 10-6 by accident in the NFL. I think he may have success with a veteran team but with a young team his attitude for coaching young men fresh out of college turned out to be poison.
August 5th, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Told you so. If you’re still looking to nit-pick the future salary caps or average past years into it……… you care more about being right than the Bucs!
August 5th, 2012 at 7:01 pm
Why is this anything to bitch a about? Bitch, bitch, bitch like a bunch of lonely housewives.
August 5th, 2012 at 7:10 pm
wow…thomas is spreading like a cancer…
thomas, quit distorting the truth. you said you don’t like spin and yet you are going round like a record baby.
evo, don’t read the site and leave. i believe it was the team quitting and the shambles of workouts, training, practice, and games that got raheem fired, not the lack of free agents. and re-read what bobby poster above.
i said before and will reiterate: the glazers and dominick, and now schiano, want a winning team on the field. they want lasting success, a dynasty per se. they had it once. were half of you negative nancies even around for the culverhouse era?
August 5th, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Joe here,
@Evo – The others above said it well. …The point is Raheem’s 2011 demise wasn’t connected to payroll. Raheem would be here right now if he won 6 games last season and his guys didn’t quit.
August 5th, 2012 at 8:09 pm
Yeah, just to second what many are already saying: I fully supported Raheem, and was hoping the team would turn it around and he would be back. I was dreadfully wrong, and he absolutely deserved to be fired. We weren’t even competitive for over half of our games. It was awful, and I hope I never have to witness football like that again from the Bucs. Now that I hear all the stories that have came out after he was fired, it just shows even more that the right decision was made.
August 5th, 2012 at 10:53 pm
Also, you can’t say this years free agency wasn’t way deeper than last years, because it totally was. Players like Carl Nicks and Vincent Jackson (VERY) rarely hit free agency, so to land those players is like hitting the NFL jackpot.
August 5th, 2012 at 11:09 pm
Thomas:
“the team front loaded (which is not unusual) the recent FA contracts which will distort the cap figure in year 1. It will flatten out in years 2 and 3,”
That is the freaking point dude. What are you trying to prove? It was actually a very smart move by Dom.
August 5th, 2012 at 11:29 pm
OK Guys I agree with you all. The team did give up. But lets be honest. If they had actually paid a few good free agents to come in and play D for us. do you think that slide would’ve been so bad? And yes after 10-6 you build through the draft. But wasn’t that 10-6 kind of lucky? I mean be honest as a bucs fan.
I want my team to win just as bad as you. But they could’ve gotten proven yet still young talent to come in and play for us at every level. People that was better than what we had here. I agree they TEAM gave up. But a few free agents here and there may have been able to pull this drop out of it’s slide. I honestly feel that.
But tell me. Do you guys think besides getting a couple rookies on defense this team will be better? Mind you I prey it will be. I’m not a happy person on sunday when someones telling me playing against my bucs was easier than their practices. I just don’t think they did enough. More so on the D-line. I liek our young linebackers (even though I think foster should be out Strong side backer) And I love the Baron pick. But whew I’m worried. I just hope they did enough.
Anyone else go to the night practice and came away thinking the defense got better?
August 5th, 2012 at 11:31 pm
And again.. I’m not saying you have to spend to the cap in order to win. All I’m saying is. you get a guy practice squad players. Thats what you get on sundays for the opposing teams. PRACTICE. Just don’t say they gave Rah a fair shake. I’m happy he’s gone. I don’t think he is good for young players. But I blame the players more than the coaches. You’d figure pride would’ve kicked in sooner or later. But it never did.
August 6th, 2012 at 12:08 am
evo:
the downfall, slide, or whatever you want to call it was a combination of events and not any one thing. could free agents have helped? who knows. hindisght is 20/20, yadayada. but i doubt it. youth was a culprit insomuch as a lack of experiece in dealing with the situation. inexperience in players and coaches.
i believe raheem got a fair shake, as fair as a person thrust into a coaching job never having learned how to be a coach or coordinator. the glazers thought that raheem would be like tomlin and didn’t want to miss out like they did tomlin. however, raheem was not ready yet, but he jumped at the chance to be an nfl head coach. raheem might yet still be a head coach. he needs to learn from his mistakes and take from the experiences.
as far as the bucs go, it is going to take some time and more players. this cannot be corrected in one year.
August 6th, 2012 at 12:24 am
thomas two point two Says:
August 5th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Little Timmy:
You can’t say that yet. If they cut bigger contracts: like benn, trueblood, black that would knock them down.
.
He can say that…since it’s as of the time of the report.
August 6th, 2012 at 12:27 am
As to the people saying Raheem got canned because the team quit on him…that’s only part of it. Finances did indeed play a role. Because of the lack of spending, the team had no veteran leadership…and that resulted in the young players giving up.
Because they didn’t have enough veterans to rely on. As a matter of fact, Raheem isn’t the only one who suffered for it. Both Preston Parker and Blount did as well, since they had not vets at their position to help them through the fumbles…since the coaches were not.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:15 am
wow pete, i know you mean well but those are some big assumptions.
we will never know what role finances played. we can guess, as everyone is wont to do. and most say the glazers were being cheap. not spending money could just as easily be the result of following their plan of building through the draft. this probably a result of doing the opposite of the grullen era.
they let go of some veterans, but most of those veterans did nothing after leaving this team. how would anyone guess after going 10-6, and starting 4-2, that the youngsters would lose like they did? again, the inexperience of the coaches to teach and get the train back on tracked to me was the bigger issue. raheem needed veteran coaches to assist but we do not know how open he was to assistance.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:20 am
I hope we see some consistency with the payroll before we forget about 2004 until basically now.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:41 am
Lurker, it being an assumption was kind of my point. By the same token, Joe and others in this thread also made assumptions. We all have and do on a regular basis.
And I really wasn’t taking sides on the issue. I believe it was a combination of things that led to the firing of Raheem Morris. Certainly, his handling of last season played a large role as well.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:42 am
And lurker, I actually agree with most of what you said above.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:51 am
i know we all make assumptions…i said yours were “big” assumptions… 😉
as i’ve said before, my post is useless, as is everyone else’s. lol
August 6th, 2012 at 4:52 am
I don’t understand Evo. You are saying last year if we addeda few free agents, you believe we could have stopped our slide. Obviously that means you believe we should pick up free agents in the middle of the season. Exactly who do you think is available as a free agent in week 8 of the regular season??? The only one I could think of is Albert Haynesworth. Oh wait, we did pick him up. How did that work out for us? Free agents were not what we needed last year. Better health and better coaching were. You could even attribute our lack of good health to coaching as well, as from all reports Raheem’s practices were very soft, which very typically leads to injuries. As much as I supported Raheem, any fool could see that we looked completely lost on defense (and offense too). It was a complete joke. We looked completely unprepared, undisciplined, and disinterested out there. That falls on the shoulders of the head coach. No free agent would fix that problem.
As for this year, correct me if I’m wrong, but we did sign a free agent CB to a $37 contract. I’d say that’s addressing a major need. We signed a veteran DT with starting experience as well. I mean, how many free agents did you want us to bring in? If GMC stays healthy and Clayborn continues to improve, our D-Line should at minimum be respectable. Mason Foster has an actual offseason to learn his new position. We have a (should be) Hall of Fame player back at safety too, which should be a very natural position switch. I got a funny feeling Talib is about to have a phenomenal season (just a hunch). Not to mention that we have coaches that actually know what they are doing back there (I hope). So to answer your question – yes, I do believe we can be drastically better on defense. As a perfect example under almost identical situations, look at the 49ers last year. They were awful in 2010 (looking lost under Singletary), then they hired Harbaugh, did virtually nothing in the offseason (unlike us), then won 14 games. And they did it with Alex Freaking Smith as their QB!
August 6th, 2012 at 4:54 am
I think the contract was actually more than $37, lol. Just add a few zeros.