I was very much in the ‘everyone calm down’ camp originally because I assumed for most of these guys it was a situation where we weren’t promising playing time because we thought we had upgrades in place (like getting the Penn guy right after Coenen went in the portal).

But it’s now clear that wasn’t the case, and we just thought we could retain the existing DL on a budget and spent our resources elsewhere. And all the big talk about a level playing field that we can now compete in may have been partially based in a naive belief that everyone was just going to follow the rev share guidelines.

We’ve missed out on several DL targets in the last couple days and even those guys weren’t particularly exciting had we gotten them. So if we’re not having to dig even deeper than that to find replacements, it could be a major problem. Not only does it seem like we have don’t have the money it takes to get proven guys in that position group, but the available options have dried up. And you can’t hide an overmatched defensive line.