When I fired up the internet this morning I saw on profootballtalk.com that Larry Warford is looking for $7M/year. My first thought was, you crazy boo! He apparently has scared away the Bears but perhaps the Texans are interested. After signing Tunsil to that big old contract though I can’t imagine they will make him a top paid guard in the league. What about the Bengals? We do not pay guards and we never have but what does $7M look like to us? So I went into full John Madden Franchise Mode.
Warford would be the highest paid OL on our team at $7M. He is not a RT nor a LT so he isn’t going to get that big money tackle money in the $12M range. $7M is at the top of the guard market and I looked across our roster and said let’s see if we can cut some people and make room. Can we get rid of our other potential guards like Billy Price and Alex Redmond. The short answer is NOPE.
The long answer is that cutting Billy Price does not save us any cap space. He is in a fully guaranteed year and accounts for -$4.8M against our cap. This means we would actually lose around $1.7M just by cutting him and not even gain that $3.1M back in cap space. I then took a look at Redmond, who we just signed. He is certainly cut-able but only makes $2.1M. Redmond would be my choice but we need to think strategic and assume Warford is going to get a 3-5 year deal.
Yes we could cut Bobby Hart but who plays RT? Warford is not. Fred Johnson is my choice but if he goes down we are royally screwed. The problem is that this line has no depth. Cutting Hart would save us $2.85 in cap room. So we could cut Hart and Redmond and save $4.95M. We could take $2M out of the Andy Dalton slush fund being used to re-sign Mixon and Green and apply it here. We are left without depth at tackle though even though Hart is about as good of a blocker as Dre Kirkpatrick was as a tackler.
I just don’t see it happening for $7M was my conclusion. Warford is a great player but it is just too much. If he comes down to $5-5.5M/year then maybe he is in the price range that the Bengals can afford. I think Duke and crew is pretty set on making it work with the roster in hand. I think they really want to get Mixon re-signed and see what they have left for Green and how he will work out this season. Sorry Larry you are just too rich for our blood.