Tyler Dunne's Desmond Bishop Article Makes No Sense

In a bit of news that was unpleasantly foreshadowed by trade rumors during April's NFL Draft, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Tyler Dunne has reported that the Packers are looking to trade, restructure or release inside linebacker Desmond Bishop. The trouble is that Dunne's explanation, if you'll permit me a cliché, raises far more questions than it actually answers.

Dunne writes that "When the Packers decided to re-sign Brad Jones and restructure A.J. Hawk's deal--both at starter's money--a financial logjam was created at inside linebacker... How much of [the Bishop situation] is based on salary, how much on overcrowding and how much on the injury is up for interpretation. This may be a case of a numbers game more than Bishop's current health."

This makes no sense on a number of levels.

First of all, Hawk isn't part of this equation. Hawk restructured his contract this offseason to save around $7 million over three years, including a not quite $2 million drop this year, from $5.45 million to $3.6 million. The restructure eased the "logjam" and made it more palatable, not less, for the Packers to keep three relatively highly paid inside 'backers. So that really doesn't apply at all. Dunne adds, four grafs later, that Hawk "could have been released", which would have helped add some context to that paragraph. However, he does not draw out the logical implication of that sentence, which is that the Packers consciously chose Hawk and Jones over Bishop. The whole thing is extremely unclear, and although Dunne's probable intention-my previous sentence-is buried in the article somewhere, it is not easy to tease out.

Second of all, even combined, the linebackers are not making very much money in 2013. Jones signed his contract for $11.75 million over three years, including a $3M signing bonus that gets paid immediately but is pro-rated over the length of the contract for cap purposes. His base salary this year is $1M, plus a total of $300,000 in per-game roster bonuses. He also has a potential $200,000 roster bonus. Add in a third of his $3M signing bonus and his total cap hit for this year is around $2.5 million. Hawk is $3.6 million as mentioned, and Bishop will make $3.464 million according to Dunne. Total: $9.564M committed to three players.

For context, the Steelers are paying Larry Foote $1.83M, Lawrence Timmons $5.8M, and backup Stevenson Sylvester has a one-year contract that's probably well under one million (figures aren't available), totaling probably around $8M. In San Francisco, Navorro Bowman will make around $5.7M, Patrick Willis around $4.6M and backup Dan Skuta around $1.3M (figures approximate due to signing bonus vagaries). Total: $10.6M. While Bowman and Willis are certainly better than Bishop and Hawk, their contracts at least indicate that the ceiling for three ILBs is lower than what the Packers are doling out for theirs. Plus, the Packers currently have between $8 and $13 million remaining in cap space, according to Tom Silverstein's estimate in April.

That actually brings up problem No. 3 with the article. It would be totally legitimate if Dunne put Bishop's salary in a larger context; as Silverstein writes in his blog post, B.J. Raji, James Jones and Sam Shields are in their contract years. Any or all could get an extension soon, and the Packers might need to clear Bishop's salary to make some room, which is a totally legitimate reason. The problem is that Dunne never actually makes that argument in the article. He just says that it "may be a case of a numbers game" without providing context about the Packers' overall cap situation. Given that that's a more likely motivation than any other immediate need to clear financial space, its omission in the Bishop article is really inexplicable.

Finally, and this is a minor thing but it bugs me, Dunne kind of paints the whole Bishop thing as if it just sort of happened on its own. Look at the passive voice: "A financial logjam was created at inside linebacker". This just randomly arose by itself? No! From the day Brad Jones got his contract in March, people were speculating about what it meant for Bishop and/or Hawk. The Packers, we can now be pretty sure, actively tried to trade Bishop during the April draft. For whatever reason, be it a need for cap space or Bishop's injury history or both, this has to have been the Packers' plan for some time. To argue otherwise is to say that Ted Thompson and company just now realized, in the last month or two, that they needed space at ILB and decided to get rid of one of the defense's best players (when healthy) to do so.

Dunne, once again, does not put the Bishop situation into the context that it deserves, and that the article had ample room to accommodate. Said article would not have missed a paragraph like "Possibly the Packers are concerned about the hamstring causing problems down the road, possibly they don't care either way. Green Bay may be perfectly fine with Jones and Hawk as the starters at linebacker, injury or not", which a) essentially repeats the earlier sentence, "How much of this decision is based on salary, how much on overcrowding and how much on the injury is up for interpretation" and b) tells the reader absolutely nothing. But we got that kind of analysis instead of the broader context, outlined above, of the whole Bishop situation. I rest my case.