Natethegreat":2tamsufh said:
I notice you didn't bring up Iupati (injured all year again), Chance Warmack, B.J.Finney, Cedrick Ogbuehi, and Greg Olson, all were wasted money. Thats a lot of swinging and missing in my book.
In order, Iupati is the ideal Solari guard and was on a dirt cheap deal. Yes he missed too many games last season, but the unit was able to run the ball much better in the 10 games that he did play in, and despite what people here think he was coming off being the second most available lineman on the team the previous season. He still outplayed his contract according to OTC so this is more like a swing and a single.
Chance Warmack is a weird mention, given he was a non-factor on a minimum salary and then sat out due to covid protocols. Not a waste of anything but not worth discussing either.
Finney was a fine signing if you understand that the point of Finney/Pocic/Fuller was to have a competition to replace Justin Britt's backloaded 2020 cap hit with an affordable center. I'm sure they were secretly hoping that the guy they drafted in Pocic would win, and he did, but that doesn't make Finney and Fuller extraneous. If they had just handed Pocic the job with no competition and he wasn't up for it we could have had another Nowak/Lewis fiasco.
Finally, Ogbuehi was solid for a backup RT. There are a lot of bad starting tackles in the NFL and it's silly to expect your backup to be particularly good (and a waste of resources). If your main reason for labeling our 2020 OL "pretty bad" is that our backups weren't good enough to be starters then you're setting expectations which are going to be impossible to meet under a fixed salary cap.