What are the NY Giants’ salary cap ramifications in all this?
Here’s where you can begin to put a positive spin on this whole thing for the NY Giants, as the team will ‘save’ the entire $3.2M (via Spotrac) they were due to pay Aldrick Rosas as part of his non-guaranteed RFA tender that he signed back in March.
With Big Blue hurting for cap space as the team only had about $10M to spare before this move, every dollar counts and should be put towards the future. When you combined the cap savings with the risk of Rosas doing this again, it starts to make more sense why this move was made.
It’s unlikely that any team jumps on Rosas via waivers at that cap number, but I’d be shocked if he doesn’t latch on to a team and become their starting kicker within a year’s time.
You can safely bet that Chandler Catanzaro was inked for a lot less than that, although official terms have yet to be released. If Catanzaro got anything more than the veteran’s minimum at all, he should really thank his agent.
In fact, he probably wasn’t guaranteed any money at all as the NY Giants surely held all the power in this particular negotiation.
Despite the overall number of camp bodies being lowered from 90 to 80 league-wide, you can also safely bet that the NY Giants will bring in some sort of competition for the newly unretired kicker, either now or at the end of training camp depending on how things go.
There’s also a solid chance that the Big Blue brass ends up snagging a kicker off of waivers on roster cutdown day right before the season that they like more than Catanzaro as there are plenty of teams that have more than one viable option on their team right now at the kicker position.
That player would likely come in the form of an undrafted free agent and maybe there will be one out there that the NY Giants had highly graded on their board but didn’t feel like it was worth it to use a pick on considering Rosas hadn’t been arrested at that point.
Former Georiga kicker Rodrigo Blankenship and would be a name that rings a bell should he lose his battle for the starting gig with the Colts, as we weren’t the only ones campaigning for Big Blue to use a late-round pick on ‘Hot Rod’ even before this whole messy situation popped up.
GMENHQ signing grade: B
Chances Chandler Catanzaro is the NY Giants’ Week 1 starting kicker: 50%