Seth Keysor's/RealMNChiefsFan's Offseason

[KC_Guy]

Seth Keysor is doing his offseason at Arrowheadpride, so I took the skeleton depth chart and adjusted it to his roster moves.
So far he's cleaned out the roster and did a free agency on the defensive side.
According to his calculations there are about 18M$ in free cap left.

So, I'm waiting for the offensive half.

 

black: 2017 player
bold: under contract through 2018
violet: 2017 Practice Squad player
blue: Free Agent Acquisition
red: Trade Acquisition
orange: UDFA Acquisition

green: released by Seth RealMNChiefsFan
cyan: Free Agent signings by Seth RealMNChiefsFan

Offense

RT - Schwartz
RG - Duvernay-Tardif
OC - Morse
LG - Witzmann, Ehinger
LT - Fisher, Erving

Other Players: Gordon (OT), K. Johnson (OG), Fulton (C/OG), Wylie (OL), Devey (OL)

QB - Mahomes II

Other Players: Bray

RB - K. Hunt, Ware, West, A. Hunt
FB - Sherman

Other Players: Atkinson, Spiller

WR - Conley, Robinson
Slot - Wright
WR - Hill, Chesson

Other Players: Kemp, Dieter, Thomas, A. Wilson, Shippen, Braverman

TE - Kelce, O. Charles, Green

Other Players: Firkser, Amaro, D. Harris

Defense

DE - C. Jones
NT - Ellis, Hamilton, S. Charles
DE - Richardson, Nunez-Roches

Other Players: Purcell (DL), Logan (NT), Jenkins (DL), Augusta (NT); McGill (NT), Bailey

WOLB - Galette, Kpassagnon, Nicolas
WILB - Pierre-Louis
SILB - Ragland, Eligwe
SOLB - Houston, Zombo

Other Players: Holmes, T. Smith, R. Wilson, D. Johnson, Hali, Ford

CB - Peters, Mitchell, Reaser
NB - Fuller
CB - Amerson, Fuller, Nelson (Amerson was added in a real world acquisition after Seth posted his Fuller approach. Guess he wouldn't sign another CB.)

Other Players: Baxter, Lampkin, Redmond, Acker, Gaines, Price, Dorleant, Iworah, Revis

FS - Joyner, Murray, McQuay III
SS - Berry, Sorensen, Terrell

Other Players: Chappell, Sterns, Parker

Specialists

K - Buttker
P -
LS - Winchester

Other Players: Colquitt (P)

 

Here's the series of Seth's pieces:

Cleaning the Roster

Retaining Free Agents

Defense Part I 

Defense Part II

Offense

[starbarkc]

We have been more active in recent memory than I think most wound expect. It's not like we need a drastic rebuild, but this may well be the off-season that sees a lot of familiar faces no longer wearing red and gold.

[Jakuvious]

11 hours ago, starbarkc said:

We have been more active in recent memory than I think most wound expect. It's not like we need a drastic rebuild, but this may well be the off-season that sees a lot of familiar faces no longer wearing red and gold.

The GM turnover I think feeds in to that probability too. Mostly the same coaching staff, but a new GM will undoubtedly have new priorities and new perspectives from the old.

[KC_Guy]

Well, I took Seth's ideas and put them into the OTC cap calculator. 

As for the structures of the contracts I compared recent 4-5 year signings of similar players and figured out that those contracts usually contain about 20% of the total as a signing bonus and 10% of the total as year 1 salary. As the Chiefs are short on cap I backloaded those contracts a bit.

For Sherman I assumed a continuation of his last contract (about 2M$/yr), KPL about the same and for Terrell a West/Ware type of contract (1 M$ for year one).

 

According to the calculator they end up with about 15.5 M$ in cap left, however, there's a mistake in the system, as the calculator miscalculate the 51 player cutoff line. Only 42 players are counted automatically. Thus you have to add 9 additional players at 600k$ apiece, leaving the Chiefs at approx 10M$ available cap for offense and special teams.

Drafted players will not really matter, as without a first round pick they will only count about 300K against the cap.

Unfortunately I'm unable to copy a photobucket link ... not sure what's wrong there.

 

[Jakuvious]

The one thing I will say regarding the overall plan, is while I quite like it as a paper depth chart, I would be very surprised if the team saw quite that much roster turnover. Some will have to happen. DJ, Hali, and Smith being gone has pretty much been a foregone conclusion for a year. But especially with knowing how loyal of a coaching staff this is, I would be surprised to see all of Ford, Harris, Bailey, and Parker gone as well. It'd be turnover of 7 of our 11 starters on defense, effectively (Logan, Bailey, Ford/Hali, Johnson, and Parker gone, with the benching of Nelson and Mitchell, and it could be argued as 8 if we want to factor Berry returning from injury.) And that gets a little dangerous. I like most of the players selected as replacements, but there is some value to continuity as well. If some of those extra cuts were $10M sort of cuts, I could see it (I wouldn't be surprised at all to see Ford move on if either Kpass is deemed ready or we think we can get a good ROLB in free agency pretty reliably), but Parker and Bailey are only moves that save ~$5M, if I remember right. Knowing that and knowing how this staff works (though Veach could be the wildcard in some of these decisions), I find it more likely we look to the draft for those spots, or look to groom RNR or Murray/Terrell further, while retaining Bailey/Parker for continuity. There is a value to continuity versus widespread changes. It's rare for substantial FA driven turnover to lead to the results it looks as though it should on paper. This is the part of the offseason where everyone can kind of dream about paper teams, but I do think it's something he doesn't really factor in here. That much turnover brings growing pains, but that's not really what you want when you're signing players in their late 20s. It's a depth chart that looks built to win next year but probably wouldn't truly pay off until the following year. And it runs the risk of being too expensive or declining when Mahomes gets developed, for that matter too.

Harris I just think the coaching staff is irrationally fond of and at a cost of $2M he won't be a salary cut.

[KC_Guy]

Jaks, I do agree. I think Seth took it a bit too far just to show what might be possible. However, I also believe that there are some urgent & glaring Needs you better not only address through the draft, especially wrt the front 7.

• The Chiefs need to seriously address the pass rush. Hali's is done, Ford didn't really show much so far (al least not enough to warrant a 9M$ contract). They could go via the draft, however, if that fails it might be too late to get a decent free agent in, be it Galette or someone else.
• Manning the nose is equally important, and I'm not sure you can draft a guy in round 3 or even later and simply plug him in. There are VERY few NT available through he draft, and most need at least a year in the weight room to be ready to play at NFL level.
• Bailey might be ok at DE, however, I was not really impressed by his performance this last year.
• I don't really see the need to bring in the second Fuller at CB. I think they have a decent core available, I'd probably augment it with a draft pick (unless  a guy like Reaser or Redmond really showed serious promise).
• Joyner is a different thing though. His presence would provide Berry much more leeway to do the things he does best without haven to worry too much about the deep side of the game.

[RedGold]

I still say finding a stud ILB that can play 3 downs is our most important need.  Ragland is good, but he can’t do the things in coverage we need him to.

Solving our coverage on RB’s and TE’s with ILB play improves at least 2-3 positions while only adding 1 player.

This improves ILB, this allows us to use Houston as a rusher more often, this makes our DL better because the OL will now have to shift more focus to Houston.