Edit: ^^^ Agreed w/ your first thought Marvin. I don't think the cap comes into play too much for Kaep, though. The offers this summer are lowballed and purely symbolic, IMO (that extra wiggle room on the cap is changing their thinking about Whitner, not Kaep, IMO).
What I had originally posted:
Not really any reporting in there, but a very good piece IMO, and I think the logic is very sound. My guess is the 9ers are currently trying to do the same thing with him that they do with everyone*, but that it probably won't work.** As the cat is already well out of the bag on Kaepernick, my guess is his agent will turn this down, and they'll let him play out the contract and then franchise him after next season. This will allow them to extend their window of the team mostly-as-is for one more year, and to have a bit more time to see if he continues progressing or not.*** If not they then have to later decide if they want to roll the dice on QB again or over-pay for above-average play a la the Bears.
Oddly, this game will probably be a bit harder to play for the Hawks b/c Wilson has already won a Super Bowl, meaning for the 9ers and Hawks the chickens of paying a starting QB what he’s worth might end up coming home to roost in the same year despite Wilson getting drafted a year after Kaep.
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*Get a year early on the extension w/ a big discount, as they just did again with Kilgore.
**The strategy works because they lock up players up before the league really takes notice of their ability (e.g. Bowman, Boone, Staley, Brock, Anthony Davis, Ian Williams, and to a lesser extent Vernon Davis all worked this way), which just isn't possible w/ a starting QB, for which there isn't a mess of information asymmetry between the team and other potential suitors. From a cap perspective in an ideal world Alex Smith would have never gotten injured, and would have played out last year and this year while they signed Kaep to a very under-market five year extension b/c he was hidden behind Alex and nobody outside of the org had seen him yet (which is exactly what they did with Boone and Williams, and are now doing with Kilgore). Oh well.
***The assumption that players ALWAYS progress being a tragically flawed one.