Originally posted by Willisfn4life:
I don't know if Cousins will be a skin or not next season. What I do know is he will not sign a long term deal this season. No way he does that with the kind of leverage he controls right now. If they have to tag him next year, depending on the tag they use, he gets a guaranteed amount of money of 28 or 32 mil. If they let him walk he gets his choice of a team on the open market. In the end, I don't think Cousins is looking to be the highest paid QB in the league, which is around 25 mil currently. He has a good preexisting relationship with Shanahan, which is always the first good check mark for a team in negotiations. Also for Cousins, I think it comes down to guarantees over annual money anyhow, which reportedly the skins have continued to low-ball him on pretty badly.
I wouldn't worry too much about our cap. The one thing we can say definitively about Marathe since he got here is he's very good at managing the cap and designing smart contracts that work for both sides.
All of this is idle chatter at the moment imo. Whether Cousins is a 49er next year or not is irrelevant. The point is Shanahan and Lynch know they have time to find their QB and this year there was no rush. CJ is not that guy. Could he become that guy? Possibly. There's that possibility with any draft pick. But they took CJ to have as a developmental project, not to be the face of the 49ers. I trust this regime will get their guy and with how smart they've been managing their cap for some time now, I'm not worried in the least how much that guy will cost or where he'll come from.
I know we don't have a cap problem now, and that's because the 49ers hardly won any games the previous two years. The minute we go above 8-8, that cap has a way of shrinking very very fast.
Short term, you are right, the Cousins issue is irrelevant. Long term, it becomes more important, specially if the 49ers perform below expectations. Right now I think folks expect between 4-6 wins. Fall below those expectations - Cousins become a big issue next offseason. Go above those expectations - ShanaLynch would have bought them more time from the Fan's perspective to get that Franchise QB, and would lessen the need to trade for Cousins.