Note my comment about being younger and cheaper does not automatically make a player a better choice. If the team is convinced a player can develop into something very good, then by all means keep him over Crawford, but if it is just based on cost, and we will lose flexibility by not having a player who can play DT and DE, then Crawford should stay.
Frankly I don’t care if keeping Crawford costs us Taco. Obviously people can have their own thoughts on this, but I think he is a lesser player than Crawford and isn’t likely to get much better.
I wouldn't make any decisions dependent on Taco specifically.
The issue for me is that with regards to
DE one or both of Hyder & Armstrong might be better than Crawford.
Hyder is only on a 1 year contract; therefore, it's not about developing him, but he looks better as an outside pass rusher
right now than Crawford, IMO.
Armstrong is getting rave reviews from camp. I have not see enough to know about him, but he is a similar style of DE to Crawford (more power/leverage than elite quickness).
Each NFL team has success with a certain numbers of young players each year and some teams have a better average than others. Over time the probability of how many young players are successful (on average) is directly tied to how many of those players the team keeps and how many snaps they play. I've seen an analysis that attempted to quantify that probability. It's a really difficult analysis because there are a huge number of variables and even just qualifying "success" is difficult from a statistical comparison perspective; however, the analysis showed that just keeping 1 extra young player each season has a fairly significant increase in the probability of a team having "success" developing young players.
