The New Orleans Saints made a handful of moves in the first wave of free agency, and one in particular has proven to quite divisive.
Bleacher Report’s Alex Kay recently released a ranking of the four best and four worst contracts of this offseason, so far. Among the four worst, was the three-year, $51 million extension that the Saints handed to defensive end Chase Young.
This is what Kay had to say about the assessment:
“Even if Chase goes on to post some of his best personal seasons over the next three years, his presence won’t result in New Orleans becoming a Super Bowl threat. The team should embrace a rebuild, but signings like this just continue to put off the inevitable.”
That has been the sentiment for most negative reviews of the Saints’ offseason so far. This is a team that is clearly still trying to contend, rather than enter the brutal rebuild that everyone expected. While it is what many fans wanted to see, it does make sense for Mickey Loomis to keep trying to win. His job hasn’t been in real peril to this point, but it certainly isn’t getting safer with losing seasons.
If they keep losing he gets fired and he then has no reason to care about the salary situation. If they win, no one will care about the money and the can will keep getting kicked down the road.
As for Young as a player, this seems to be about fair deal for his talents at defensive end. He generated the 12th-most pressures at the position last year, but did only have 5.5 sacks. That seems to be evened out as he now has the 17th-highest yearly salary at that spot. There is a chance that this ends up as a nightmare deal for the Saints, but the more likely result is that he remains somewhere around that fringe-top 15 area at the position.
