TBURGESS

If Nichols goes out for a long time, Willy or not, we're done. Either you don't remember the 1-4 start Willy led us to or are you're ignoring it. 6 gaming Willy has almost all the perceived disadvantages of cutting him, and we get to pay him too. As for Nichols on the 6 game instead of Willy, his salary is less than half of what Willy makes and unless he goes down in the next 3 games, his bonus has to be paid from the SMS. Nope, its the depth is bad if you have to vastly overpay for it argument. You're one of the first who would jump all over Taman for paying $400K+ for a backup QB, but because we're doing it, it's not only OK, but nonsense for anyone to have a different opinion. You think that Walters went into the season saying 'How will we handle the SMS if Willy stinks the joint out so we have to start Nichols'?

IR'ing Willy is only an advantage if he stays there longer than 6 weeks. If you 6 game Willy, he can't practice for 4 weeks. Davis takes over the #2 spot on the roster anyway. If Nichols gets hurt in the first 6 weeks, Davis goes into the game, you have no SMS advantage if you bring Willy back and Davis will have taken all the #2 reps. Keeping Willy means we're paying about $200K for half a season of backup QB insurance that we hope we never need to use. If we do, we hope that he can find the game he had a couple of years back before all the injuries.

Funny, I would have said, no team in their right mind would pay a backup QB $410K, especially when he lost the starting gig a month ago. That's just pure stupidity.

IMO, the CFLPA is looking for some deeper pockets than the CFL to offload the concussion issues to. Could be good for the players.

Yup, you'd have the money right there to pay the additional $100K for Nichols bonus, if you assume that every player who is on the team is making 50K less than every player who is on the IR and that we'd cut or IR all the players who are starting once we bring back the guys on the IR. It answers the question of can we afford to keep Willly, but it doesn't answer the questions of if Willy's worth what he's being paid or if he's a good vet backup QB, which are the reasons you'd want to keep him.

For every player you have on the IR, you have another player who is being paid. The difference between the IR'd players salary and the playing players salary minus their bonuses (Signing, Games Played, Etc) is what we are saving on the SMS. Once the player comes off of the IR, you have to cut the guy who was playing or account for both salaries, IR the other player, or offer them a PR spot and bump on of the PR players if they take it. Denmark's entire salary and Nichols $100K bonus wouldn't have been on the books when they set up this years SMS. Those two moves alone eat up a ton of the contingency space. It's very possible that we could account for Willy's salary plus Nichols bonus, plus Denmark, plus the rest of the backups who are getting starting time and stay under our SMS limit. The real question should be... should we? The answer is yes if you think that Willy is a good vet QB who is worth top 6 in the league salary. It gets less obvious if you don't believe either that he's a good vet QB or he's worth his salary and I don't believe either are true.

It's not just about Nichol's $100K bonus, although I'm sure that it's not in the SMS budget as the Bombers would have expected that money would only be paid out if Willy was on the 6 game. It's also about paying Willy $150-$200K to hopefully sit on the bench for the rest of the season. That money could be better used elsewhere. I get the 'we need a good vet backup QB' argument, but I don't see Willy as a good vet backup QB. Personally, I'd rather go with Davis and the extra money. We've got about a week to make decisions on cutting vet players if we need to reduce the salaries to stay withing the SMS limit (And I think we're close). No one player is going to give us $150-200K of SMS space for half a season because no other player is getting paid 300-400K. That means dropping 2 vets to make it up. Macho Harris doesn't have much use now that Loffler's taken his spot. Hurl's being paid $120K to be a special teams player, but cutting him would hurt our NI depth. Neuf is expensive, can't stay healthy, but is on the IR so his salary is 'hidden', so not much advantage to getting rid of him. Any other suggestions?

Agreed, but full playing time bonuses could be anything from $100 per game to $100K if he starts more than X games or anywhere in between. I expect that at least some of his bonus money would have been paid out at the start of the season. Ed Tait http://www.bluebombers.com/2016/08/20/209750/ says: "Drew Willy has been a pro since Nichols grabbed the No. 1 QB chores from him, but the move – as inspired as it has been for the team – also creates a potential salary-cap squeeze for the Bombers. The club is paying Willy a QB1 rate, while Nichols has some bonuses in his contract that will max out if he keeps playing." - IMO that means that Nichols has more bonus money in his contract than Willy does, which would make sense as Nichols was the backup QB when he signed his contract and Willy was the undisputed starter. I still say that Willy's contract size plus how he's played this year makes him untradeable.

I just reread that article. It doesn't say how much of the salary is bonuses nor does it say that the contract is bonus laden.

This is the first time I've read the bolded part. Do you have a source? IIRC Willy's first contract was incentive based and his second was more guaranteed/less bonuses. A couple of weeks back Brown was talking on the radio about Willy having a $22K game check, which would mean $396K over 18 games and 15K of bonuses. How much of that was paid out at the beginning of TC and how much is playing bonus wasn't discussed.

Yup. Looked like Frederick was locking them down. I'd like to see him at DI instead of a LB this week.

Bowman against the Riders D seems like a lock to me.

Why would he want to go to the dumpster fire that is the Riders if he can make as much money and have as good a shot at starting elsewhere?

We won't be trading Willy this year. No one wants him at $411K, let alone give us a good player and take on his salary. We'll likely hold on to him for the rest of the season then ask him to take a pay cut to less than half what he's currently making. I'd rather sign Franklin and let Willy go, but I doubt management will see it that way.

Still less than Willy's making.

We should be able to get a starting QB in trade for Willy? SMH.

Calgary, BC and Ottawa are the only teams above .500 right now. i'd call them top tier even tho Ottawa lost big this weekend. Calgary's only lost to BC this year. BC will go as far as the inexperienced Jennings can take them and that should be good enough to beat most teams. Ottawa's confusing right now. They haven't looked that good since Burris came back, but it was enough to beat Edmonton. In danger of falling out of the top tier to be replaced by Hamilton IMO. Wpg, Edm, Ham and Tor all with 4 wins are the middle tier. Kilgore is Brink bad. He was 7-14 for 41 yards with 2 Ints. He's thrown 10 ints in less than 3 full games. I doubt that Toronto wins another game until Ray gets back, then they still have to fix that passing defense. In danger of falling down into the bottom tier. Hamilton with Collaros is a different team. Sure they got lucky on the first TD yesterday, but they turned 6 TO's into 53 points against a very bad Riders team. In a couple more weeks, I think they will have moved up to top tier. Edmonton can win games on offense alone and the defense is looking better, although playing against Kilgore leaves that up in the air. In a fight with us for the last playoff spot for the rest of the year. Winnipeg's won 3 in a row for the first time in years based on leading the league in takeaways and all 3 facets of the team playing well at the same time. Montreal is in the tweener tier. Not quite good enough to be in the middle tier. Not so bad to be lumped in with Regina. If they win next week, they'll be at 4 wins which puts them in consideration for the middle tier. Regina's in the lowest tier. Hard to put anyone else in there considering how bad they really are this year.

After watching the games this weekend, I've got to say If we don't beat the Riders in both games, we don't deserve to be in the playoffs. They are way worse than I thought they'd be by this point in the season especially considering they still have Durant.

Edmonton's not top tier this year. They've got one of the worst defenses in the league and they've won less games than we have.

More like the monthly attack the poster, not the post.

I see your point but, I don't think taking away two turnovers at the end of the game tells the real story. The rain delay game was won/lost in the first quarter. It was pick 6 on Masoli's first throw, 2 and out, great punt return, 12 yard TD pass and we're up by 14. Ham has a 5 play drive ending in a fumble. We have a 7 play drive ending in a TD and the route was on. The last 2 turnovers in the rain delay game didn't have any effect on the outcome, because we were already so far ahead, but IMO, we wouldn't have been that far ahead except for the 4 turnovers that had already happened in that game.

Randle > Roberts Loffler > Macho Adams played great last year. Frederick has played great this year. Personally, I'd want them both on the roster and reduce the LB DI's by one.

I'm not missing your point. I'm saying you're wrong.

Neufeld can't stay healthy and his replacement is outplaying him by a large margin. He's a very expensive 6th OL, but I'd still keep him around this year because of his passport. I hope we can find better in the off season and get something in return for Neufeld.

We got 6 turnovers in each of 3 games so it would 2 or 3 be out of 18, not out of 12 and we likely don't get into garbage time without getting so many turnovers in the first place. For example... If Masoli doesn't throw a pick 6 on the first play of the game we likely don't score 21 points in the first 10 minutes to start the rout. I use things from the past to explain my negativity in the past. Ignoring the negatives just so you can be positive isn't objective. Any thinking person would be negative when the team doesn't make the playoffs for 4 straight years and then goes 1-4 to start this year. I didn't even go negative until we fired Berry and replaced him with Kelly and it's been mostly horrible ever since. I certainly understand why you don't accept the obvious. If you did, you couldn't use your 'positivity' as an excuse to call me out on my 'negativity' and that's a big part of your forum persona. It's pretty obvious that you care deeply about my level of negativity, because you post about it all the time.