Hear me out.
I’m going to be frank – and yes, you can still be Garth – most of you reading this article already have a fairly strong view on Matt Kalil and his future with the Panthers one way or the other; I probably know what it is. Whether you think there’s no way Matt Kalil should be in the NFL, let alone on the Panthers, all I ask is that you spare me a few minutes to read why cutting Matt Kalil may not be the best path forward and, if you still disagree, then at least you’ll be sure.
The Panthers are almost certainly going to cut Matt Kalil and eat a portion of his salary – let me tell you why that’s not a great idea.
First, it’s important to note that cutting Kalil or not cutting Kalil is not an action in a vacuum, and can only be effectively judged in comparison to other options. Much like democracy, this should be a pursuit of the least bad option – what this means is that when examining whether the Panthers should release Kalil, you also have to look at who they might replace him with and whether that is an amount of progress that justifies the cost.
Also, everything I am going to write works on the assumption that Matt Kalil is actually healthy enough to play, not that he is never going to get hurt again but that, as far as the team knows now, he is going to be able to participate in offseason activities at 100% in a few months. As Panther fans unfortunately found out with Michael Oher, sometimes players just aren’t able to come back – that is not something I have the information to explore here and so will be assumed not to be the case.
Now, let me state something very obvious but also very important: the aim of roster building is to put the most effective combination of players on the field for every game of a season. In a hard cap league like the NFL, this means getting the most out of the assets available. So far, so uncontroversial. The key point here, and one that goes unsaid too often, is that this doesn’t mean getting better at every opportunity. Sometimes, and this is where I’m aware I might lose some people, sometimes it’s better to opt for the worse player.
The reason for this, as it so often is, is money. Given the limited amount of cap space each team has, the key is to make the biggest improvement for the expense, and that what this often means in practice is opting for the cheaper – but slightly worse – option in order to be able afford more significant improvements elsewhere. To make a very crass parallel, this is like opting to have a cheaper, less ideal, breakfast in order to be able to afford lunch and dinner. As nice as that breakfast might be, not going hungry for the rest of the day is likely to lead to a better average outcome.
Now let’s talk about that money in more detail.
Matt Kalil is due $12.15m in 2019, $15.9m in 2020 and $16.4m in 2021; that is a lot of money, but how much of it can they get out of? Well, $14.7m of it is guaranteed, so if they want, they can cut him tomorrow and pay him that sum straight up, but the issue with that move is that it would actually involve the Panthers paying Kalil more money than they would if they kept him on the roster.
Generally, paying somebody more to not play for you is something that teams do their best to avoid. The other option they have is to designate his release as post June 1st – or to actually wait until after June 1st to release him, which would allow them to save $7.25m in 2019 with a cap hit of $4.9m in 2019 and $9.8m in 2020 – all to not play for them. If they keep him for 2019 and then release him in 2020, he would be due just the $9.8m.
What the question boils down to then, is whether the Panthers can find a better player than Matt Kalil for $7.25m. So can they?
Up Next: Rather The Devil You Know Or The Devil You Don’t?
