Its not a matter of accepting mediocracy, its trying to minimize your losses here. Look, it was a bad contract and the team got burned, but you got to look going forwards how to minimize your losses. Of course if Carr says no to any type of paycut, he is released, but if he does take a modest paycut, this is what you are looking at.
Right now Carr is on the books for about $13 million........way too much money for his production.........however, if we release him, we have to eat about $7 million in dead money. We then have to go and get another CB in free agency that can be a starter. Lets do the math here.....
New CB in free agency will cost you $3 million easy, so add that to the $7 million cap hit for releasing Carr and you are already at $10 million. Now that would be the same as Carr taking a $3 million dollar pay cut to drop from his cap hit from $13 to $10 million.
Ergo, it all come down to the evaluation......can you get a CB for $3 million in free agency that will be better than Carr if he takes a $3 million pay cut? The cap hit as I just showed you is the same either way, so that is the decision you have to make.
I'm not sure you are understanding how the cap hit works.
Carr costs us
$13,817,000 against the cap next year if he is still on the team (and refuses to take a paycut).
If he is released, it saves us
$6,383,000 in cap room. Yes, $7,434,000 is dead money but that is 13,817,000 - 7,434,000 so the Cowboys now gain $6,383,000 in cap room. He counts $7,434,000 no matter what, unless of course he is June 1st cut. In that scenario, he hits us for $4,717,000 in dead money in 2016 and then another $2,717,000 in 2017. We would gain $9,100,000
but not until after June 1st.
So if I can use $3M to sign a new free agent CB who will come in, compete, and play at an equal or hopefully higher level than Carr has the past few years, I'd still have another $3.383M to go fix another position. Plus, Carr would be completely off the books before 2017.
