[gold_and_red]

Originally Posted by RealSNR

Our problem is overpaying players. Our "top" players aren't good enough. And the bigger problem is it's really difficult to move on from those overpaid players.

If we were shitty with nothing but 1-year contract retreads and rookie contract guys, that would be one thing. But as it turns out, we're paying Hitchens, Clark, and Honey Badger. We WERE paying Houston and Berry.

And now we have guys like Jones and Fuller and Breeland coming up, where they're perceived to be our truly best players, so then we end up paying THEM. Because if we don't, we're gonna become really shitty, right?

We eventually found a decent defense post-Vermeil by starting from square one. Literally. No overpaid douchebags. No blockbuster trades. We were really shitty for a couple years, but then we found a stride and produced a defense that wasn't exactly legendary, but it could at least stop people.

And that's the problem. If we do that now, we're wasting the best years of Mahomes' career. Yeah. We might be. But that's the only way we're ever going to have a chance at getting him a real defense to work with.

We have only 5 draft picks next year. We lost our extra 2nd rounder (thanks a lot, Frank!) We're not getting any comp picks. Veach is probably gonna get antsy and trade up/back/forward or trade for more people next year, too.

At this point I honestly think we stand a better chance post-Mahomes extension than pre-extension.

I was always told that we had to overpay defensive players because of Smith's anemic offenses. It looks like there is a more fundamental problem.