you can't overcome 15 years of bad defensive drafts in one draft. you fill a gap here or there with a FA, or a top FA, but you can't sign a few each year.
the issue with signing those listed above was bad "assessment" of those players, vs. what we already have. we never needed to sign any of them. what we had on the team was already better. had nothing to do with the cap. I was opposed to signing Poe, McCoy from the get go. I never like Dix signing because he was washed up....
instead of all of those contracts, for just about the same money we could have kept Jones, so we don't break the DB field and keep a good CB that would strengthen a defense, for the type of defense that Mike Nolan runs...yeah he didn't get Ints, and 95% of the people on this board wanted him gone...that's bad defensive assessment of available players.. you don't need to sign 5 defensive players to make the defense good. you should need one or two....building a defense through FA doesn't work.
given all the bad FA signings we have had over the past 10+ years on the defensive side alone...would you have any confidence in this FO signin FA if we had 50M on cap space?
no, we didn't sign these low cost scrubs because of money...there was enough money to sign them...we signed them because Jerry and his FO don't know how to build a defense, Draft or FA. so thus, we sit here and argue why Dak doesn't win games all by himself....in the meantime we have a defense that's giving up 36 pts per game, 300,200, 200, 200, 300 yard rushing in one season....that's 1200 yards in 5 games....
and Jaylon Smith got a very large top 5 LB contract at the time he signed.....that was Jerry doing his business partner a favor.....
the only way to fix this defense is to draft well. sign a couple of key FAs.....if we don't solve that problem, 185M cap space can't build a good defense.
