Re-signed Griff Whalen Waived Tony Bergstrom The move to cut Bergstrom leaves Luke Bowanko as the one healthy backup offensive lineman. My head is spinning. Bergstrom must have really sucked that he couldn't beat out Eleumenor. or is this another case of John Harbaugh being loyal to one of "his" guys? Or, they didn't want to give up their 7th rd draft choice for him. I get the Whalen signing since Wallace, Maclin, and Perriman are on the injury report.
I tended to think that Bergstrom was more the result of the conditional pick the Ravens traded. Surely it was based on starts and playing time, so they probably didn't want to risk it if they felt he wasn't significantly better than what they had plus the resource. Clearly he wasn't if he's gone now.
I don't know what to call the Bergstrom situation outside of stupid. He was the backup when Yanda went down, and he played fairly well imo in that one game. Then he's inactive week after week and now cut when we're practically out of backup o-lineman. Everything about this seems stupid from my perspective
The puzzling thing is assuming Bergstrom applies for termination pay it will cost the Ravens 12 weeks of pay against the salary cap for his replacement. For Whalen (775k vet minimum) that would mean nearly 500k with another 12 weeks to go. They are getting pretty tight on space.
So the Ravens re-signed Bergstrom and cut Cb Tony McRae. I'm confused. Does this help the cap situation? I thought if you cut/waived a player, it would be dead cap money for the following year. Someone please explain the reasoning to cutting him in the beginning of the week and re-signing him on Saturday. Why didn't they just cut McRae when they sighned Whalen?
It's only dead cap space if we were on the hook for any future prorated signing/roster bonuses, and they would have hit this season. But since we traded for Bergstrom, his previous team had to eat all accelerated bonus money. Short answer, not we weren't going to have any dead cap money for him next season no matter what. That said, I don't get what the purpose of cutting him was just to bring him back the same week. As I said above, it's all just stupid to me. Maybe they re-signed him for less salary, I don't know
Looks like we're on the hook for $398k this year if his signing binus is covered by Arizona (overthecap.com). Both overthecap and spotrac don't seem to have too much on this cut/resigning. On the surface it looks like it was to get out of the deal he had with Arizona in favor of one of their own. However, the dollar amount looks the same but overthecap also shows the cap hit as ~$398k.
