Gostkowski signs for franchise tag value of 1-year, $4.59 million
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Third time BB has used the franchise tag on a kicker, FWIW. Clearly values stability at the position and ability to not have to think about it.
ilol@u said:
Only if he'd rather have $60 million than $45 million (?) and the pride of playing for a winner.
No, it doesn't mean DMC is gone. They still have 8 days to exclusively negotiate with him as well.ilol@u said:
No.ilol@u said:
It's a calculated risk. They can't afford for DMC to play for the franchise tag if they want Revis. DMC wants to be here and the Pats want him back. I think longterm deal is the end result.
I don't think this is really all that surprising. They've had two years to work out a long-term extension with McCourty and never showed much inclination to do that. BB also clearly has a decent amount of confidence in Harmon playing the single-deep safety role, given that he was perfectly willing to move McCourty up to cover a TE and leave Harmon back in certain looks (like the decisive play against the Ravens).
I'm not saying DMC is necessarily gone. But I think the Pats will be unwilling to go over a certain number on him and I wouldn't be surprised if that number is lower than many people assume.
I'm not saying DMC is necessarily gone. But I think the Pats will be unwilling to go over a certain number on him and I wouldn't be surprised if that number is lower than many people assume.
DanGrazianoESPN Dan Graziano
If McCourty hits market, I'd expect Giants to make a play. I don't think he's leaving Pats, but I thought they'd franchise him.
If McCourty hits market, I'd expect Giants to make a play. I don't think he's leaving Pats, but I thought they'd franchise him.
Doug Kyed @DougKyedNESNhttps://twitter.com/DougKyedNESN · 3m
3 minutes agohttps://twitter.com/DougKyedNESN/status/572485507319504897
Patriots still have a week to negotiate with McCourty on a long-term deal. I'd advise Patriots fans not to panic.
3 minutes agohttps://twitter.com/DougKyedNESN/status/572485507319504897
Patriots still have a week to negotiate with McCourty on a long-term deal. I'd advise Patriots fans not to panic.
Pardon my ignorance on subjects like the salary cap and managing money on the books, but does this indicate a low franchise tag hit for kickers as compared to safeties? If the Patriots are trying to squeeze every dollar out of the roster for the upcoming year, especially as it relates to retaining more than one or two of their free agents to be, could this be an effort to be more creative with Revis/McCourty contracts while simultaneously locking up another position of need? From this link, it looks like they're saving ~$5.5M towards the cap by applying the tag to a kicker compared to a safety. This allows them to creatively structure a more team friendly extension with Devin that could (maybe?) net both him and Gostkowski for the same total cap implication of just tagging McCourty, let alone negotiating an extension for a top-flight kicker.
"Panic" is pointless because we can't influence events one way or another.
Yes, there is a week. There also are teams out there with no safeties worth having on the roster, and certainly in a starter's role. He's the #1 guy in FA at the position. Waiting a week seems like a no-brainer.
Two thoughts about this. First, if retaining Gost was a priority, I would expect the franchise number isn't that much more than the annual amount it's going to cost to keep him anyway. Second, we've heard that the Patriots need to increase their cash spending this year. Kicker contracts don't really tend to be too complicated, with too much deferred cap stuff anyway, but given the requirement to spend cash now, the Patriots probably were going to pay him around the same number as his cap hit this year anyway. If he hadn't been tagged, I expect Gost would have topped the Hauschka contract from last year, so you're probably talking something around 3/10. Given the Patriots' need to spend cash, if they wanted him at that number, they probably end up paying around 3.3 or so next year in both cash and cap hit. What's the franchise going to cost them? Another $1 million? Lots of money for sure with the other priorities, but if you believe he's a key piece of the puzzle, it's not that much extra to spend for the flexibility of avoiding a long term contract.
I'm not convinced that the plus value of a great kicker is worth the premium they command, given how kicking seems to be getting better and better league wide. But, Belichick seems to disagree, and special teams seem to be an area he understands in and out.
I'm not convinced that the plus value of a great kicker is worth the premium they command, given how kicking seems to be getting better and better league wide. But, Belichick seems to disagree, and special teams seem to be an area he understands in and out.
BigJimEd said:
Highest-paid kickers in the league right now are around $3.7M per year, and only Janikowski has more than 50% of his total guaranteed. I think this is a move just to take away negotiating leverage, and you likely end up with a either a 3-year deal worth around $12M with $5-6M guaranteed, or a 4-year deal worth around $16M with $6-7M guaranteed. BB has let kickers play under the franchise tag before, but I can't see him spending $4.5M this year on the position when you can realistically get the cap hit down to around $3M probably and still work out a good deal.
Yeah I think there is a good chance they get something done longer term. You could do 4 years, $16M total, $6M guaranteed. Base salaries of say $1.5M-$2.5-$3.0-$3.0 with hits of $3.0-$4.0-$4.5-$4.5 or something like that. Everyone wins. Could even reduce the 2015 base salary lower and increase one of the back years.
I'm not sure where the $4.5 million number is coming from.
From this October article by La Canfora, the kicker franchise amount is 2.88 percent of cap.
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/writer/jason-la-canfora/24749485/nfl-franchise-tags-position-by-position-projected-numbers
The cap this year is 143,280,000. So, by my calculation, kicker is due $4.126 million. I don't think, even with a long term deal, Gost would have ended up taking up much less cap space than this if the Patriots had resigned him, given their need to spend cash -- maybe a few hundred k.
From this October article by La Canfora, the kicker franchise amount is 2.88 percent of cap.
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/writer/jason-la-canfora/24749485/nfl-franchise-tags-position-by-position-projected-numbers
The cap this year is 143,280,000. So, by my calculation, kicker is due $4.126 million. I don't think, even with a long term deal, Gost would have ended up taking up much less cap space than this if the Patriots had resigned him, given their need to spend cash -- maybe a few hundred k.
DennyDoyle'sBoil said:
Yeah, La Confora doesn't factor in that it can also be 120% of the player's cap charge, which is why Suh would have had a franchise tag of nearly $27M despite the positional tag being far less. So that's how Gostkowski gets to $4.5M.
FYI, here is the franchise player language from the CBA. And the formatting is crap, so I've tried to improve it but it still sucks
tims4wins said:
Ghost loses bigtime here. Right now, he basically has a one year, 4.5 million dollar guaranteed contract. I'm not sure why he'd take 6 million guaranteed with base salaries less every year than he'd be getting now. If they want to work out something with Ghost, I'd expect there to be at least 10 million guaranteed, probably closer to 13-15.
Ok I mis worded it. Meant to write $6M signing bonus. Then you can guarantee year one and two salaries. So it is $10M guaranteed and still fairly cap friendly and cuttable after two years if they need to.
There will be nowhere close to 10M guaranteed on a deal for a kicker this offseason. That's topping the previous high in guaranteed money by 25%.
Edit: shitty at math.
Edit: shitty at math.
Fine, sure. Split the difference. Guarantee first year salary so $7.5M guaranteed. Basically a win all around right? The whole point here is that coming up with a contract that benefits both parties and helps with the 2015 cap seems far easier for a kicker than for DMC.
tims4wins said:
Chuck Z said:
Ahh, interesting. Thanks guys. I guess "prior year salary" must be defined to be the cap charge and to include prior amortized bonuses. If I'm reading Miguel's 2014 pages right, Gostkowski had 2.9m in salary last year, 800k in deferred signing bonus, and a 105.6k workout bonus. If the workout bonus counts, the franchise salary for Gostkowski next year will actually be a bit closer to 4.6 million than 4.5. With all due respect to Chuck, that's a lot of freaking money for a kicker.
Chuck Z said:
So what? They just guaranteed him 4.5 million for one year. If you're his agent, why are you taking anything less than 10? He'd have to fall off a cliff to be making less than 3 million next season, which already gets you to 7.5 over 2 years.
tims4wins said:
Yeah, it's very doable. I still think $7.5 guaranteed is a lot of dough. There's only one kicker right now with a guarantee above $5M, and that's Janikowski at $8M on what is widely regarded as a dumb deal. I think the final guarantee ends up between $5-7M in any deal.
DennyDoyle'sBoil said:
Look, if they want a cheaper option, I'm available for probably a tenth of that. Again, I don't think he ends up playing on the franchise this year, but BB has done it before. My gut tells me he gets a deal done for around $4M per year. Kickers aren't easy to come by, especially ones that can play well in big games. We've been spoiled in having two excellent ones for the last 20 years, but there are a lot of teams where this is a question mark every few years.
Ed Hillel said:
Because for better or for worse, the career of a kicker can change dramatically in a span of a few games without a major injury, more than other players. The nature of the position is that a few games of significant struggles can be enough to derail a career. Couple in the fact that you do have kicker accuracies improving across the board in the NFL, and most teams are typically very reticent to give any significant guaranteed money to kickers. It just doesn't happen.
Look, I love kickers. But teams need kickers to be fungible and easy to get rid of. Why? Because if your one kicker sucks, you need to be able to move on and get another, otherwise your season is up in smoke because some soccer player couldn't cut it. You don't hamstring your team's ability to do that by giving a kicker a shitload of guaranteed money. If Gostkowski's agent asked for $10M guaranteed, he'd be laughed out of the room because it simply doesn't fit the mechanics of how the kicking position works in the NFL.
I understand what you are saying, but Ghost is young for a kicker, has a long history of success, and just got paid 4.5 million for this season. There are obviously a number of factors for him to consider, including security, how much he enjoys NE, etc. However, if he decides to look at it from a purely economic standpoint, I don't see why he'd take close to 7.5 million, because the odds he'll have made more than that 2 years from now are really high. I know injuries are a consideration, and he's been injured himself before, but come on, man...The guy is a kicker. A kicker. It's not like they're actually out there playing football.
*Runs and hides*
*Runs and hides*
We should also consider that narrower uprights and longer extra points if the rule change goes through might change the math on what's acceptable to spend on a kicker. BB may be getting out ahead of the market before the new rules change the algebra.
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Lurker Cowboyup15 brought up an interesting point that I thought was worth mentioning: What happens if the extra point is moved back to, say, 40 yards? Does that start to increase the value for kickers? Personally, I'm not sure it would make a huge difference, as kickers are getting more accurate and have more leg, but it would certainly add some value, I'd think.
There are two ways to look at it. The first is that NFL kickers the last couple years have made 40-49 yard FGs at nearly an 80% clip. So while it will have some effect, if we're talking about 40 TDs per year, the net change is maybe 8 points on average, so half a point per game. And I don't know if that's enough to really change things in terms of pay, since you start getting towards equavalences in expected point scored if you look at 2 point conversions then. Plus, if a kicker misses one, you then have more 2 point conversions to make up for that and try to equalize scores, so you may see further reduction in number of XPs attempted.Ed Hillel said:
The second is that in theory, it should place a premium on good long-distance kickers. But the sample sizes are relatively small there, so who knows how well they hold up over a bigger size and whether that extra value really exists at the top end.
What I would actually love to see, even though it would effectively kill the kicker, is a move towards rugby-styled kicks where the player who scores has to kick the XP, or you go for two. I don't think you'll see it any time soon, but that would legitimately add more strategy to the game and be really cool to watch.
Edit: And yes, the kicker union probably isn't hapy with me right now.
Not really. He's middle of the pack in terms of touchback percentage, so it's more coverage when he doesn't whack it through the end zone. His hang is around 4 seconds so pretty average as well. Gostkowski's strength is that he has an incredibly accurate leg that is consistent through 50 yards and is likely to stay that way for the forseeable future. But for reasons mentioned above, you still don't give a kicker a lot of guaranteed cash because yips happen.Rudy Pemberton said:
Chuck Z said:
This isn't a park-adjusted measure, though, is it? Kickers dealing mostly with indoor kickoffs or kickoffs in non-windy environments would have an easier time of it.
Harry Hooper said:
True, and there are a couple reasons for this actually. Super Nomario and I spent a couple weeks in January trying to figure it out, with him already having spent a lot of time on it before as well:
-the sample sizes in any given year for a stadium are tiny. You're talking 100-140 kickoffs per year. And half of those are taken by one player, so it's difficult to pull out park effects from the overall talent of a kicker, because it's not like you're seeing a true representative sample
-because kickers have improved so much over the last 10 years, using a dataset from multiple years produces weird results such as "every kicker right now is the best kicker in history". Not quite that extreme, but it pretty much does skew every kicker today to appear above-average, and you can't normalize for individual years in stadiums because the sample sizes are too small.
-further complicating things is the movement of the yard line for kickoffs from the 30 to the 35 prior to the 2011 season. So the data before is apples to oranges anyways for kickoffs.
So park effects are pretty much out for touchbacks. So let's look at the top touchback guys in the league. Of the top 10, three had question marks regarding either domes or weather (McAfee IND, Martin DET, McManus DEN). Beyond that, every one is open air and regular altitude, with several (Tucker BAL, Walsh MIN, Cundiff CLE, Gay BUF) playing in cold-weather locales that are generally a mess in the winter.
Gostkowski's 54% touchback rate is well below the mean of 67% by this top group, with a standard deviation of about 6%. So you're a full two deviations outside, although at a pretty small sample size. But there's a pretty good chance that Gostkowski's falling below this top group is due to his talent on kickoffs more than anything else.
Edit: And also, you have four other dome guys from NO, ARI, STL, and HOU in the bottom half of the league as well, so it's not like they're all clustered just outside the top 10. Only Matt Bosher from ATL and Dan Bailey from DAL are also in the top 15, so it's 5 in the top 15 and 4 in the bottom 15 for the dome guys. Pretty even split.
Rudy Pemberton said:
Mostly. Last year they gave up 21.6 yards per return, which is 2.6 yards below the league average, and 4th-lowest mark in the league. Of the three teams that were better, the Bills and Giants were about 5% better in terms of touchbacks, but the Bears were about 11% worse.
Edit: And yes, I do have a multi-page excel file that has all of this since I'm working on a couple projects on punters and kickers that are hopefully done shortly.
Field Yates @FieldYates now4 seconds ago
Patriots news: K Stephen Gostkowski has signed his franchise tag tender worth $4.59M for the 2015 season, per source.
Patriots news: K Stephen Gostkowski has signed his franchise tag tender worth $4.59M for the 2015 season, per source.
Yep seemed like a no-brainer for him to sign the tender, that is a lot of guaranteed money for a kicker.
Lets hope they can bring that cap hit down with a long-term contract.
With him signing does that mean the Pats have 4.5M less cap space or was that already accounted for when they placed the tag on him?
Lets hope they can bring that cap hit down with a long-term contract.
With him signing does that mean the Pats have 4.5M less cap space or was that already accounted for when they placed the tag on him?
Seems like Ghost discussion is starting to creep into the Revis thread so might be worth a bump.
The reason I question the Ghost franchise is due in large part to his usage. Ghost is an upper echelon kicker but where he is on that list is very tough to gauge for one simple reason, NE does not have him attempt tough kicks. He attempted only one 50+ kick last year which ties him for dead last.
If you take out 50+ kicks there are an awful lot of kickers kicking near 90%.
NE seems to be paying a premium for a position they don't really leverage.
The reason I question the Ghost franchise is due in large part to his usage. Ghost is an upper echelon kicker but where he is on that list is very tough to gauge for one simple reason, NE does not have him attempt tough kicks. He attempted only one 50+ kick last year which ties him for dead last.
If you take out 50+ kicks there are an awful lot of kickers kicking near 90%.
NE seems to be paying a premium for a position they don't really leverage.
j44thor said:
Gostkowski is 13-17 from 50+ in his career, working out to about 76%. NFL average the last 3 years from this distance is around 63%. And in 2013 he was 5-6 from this distance.
Edit: Stat correction
Most of what smart teams pay for in a kicker is for kickoff value given the year-to-year volatility in accuracy, so I don't think its fair to say they don't leverage the position. They kick off a lot in tough weather.
4.25 is certainly a full cap number for a kicker on a team tight against the cap though.
4.25 is certainly a full cap number for a kicker on a team tight against the cap though.
Chuck do you have a breakdown of how many of those were in foxboro?
Seems like you already have a ton of kicker data on hand. If not I'll look it up later.
Seems like you already have a ton of kicker data on hand. If not I'll look it up later.
Ask Indy about this. They need a dedicated kick off kicker. What a waste of a roster spot.Stitch01 said:
NortheasternPJ said:
Sorry, I was looking at the wrong column of my data actually. Gostkowski is 13-17 over that time period for 76%, not 17-21.
6 of those 13 makes were in Foxboro.
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