heres a question, dont know if anyone can answer it.
if we had not changed the board and sheens had not been sacked where the hell would we have been come next year if our cap is so stuffed, surely the people who were doing our player recruitement had some sort of plan.or was the club just going to fold, so what iam getting at they have been buying players in the past back loading and carring on without any real probs yet now the new board comes in and the sun has fallen from the sky, i just dont get it.
They talk about this phenomenon a lot in American sport, particularly baseball where there are some very long contracts given out. Basically it comes down to unaligned interests between the people doing roster management and the team itself.
The GM and his staff at a baseball team know that if they don't produce a good team in the next couple of years they will probably be out of a job, so they have an incentive to the short term. This is why baseball players in their 30s get signed to 10-year deals which everyone involved knows will be absolute millstones by the second half of their life - because the person giving the contract basically thinks "if we win in the next couple of years I'll be fine, and if we don't I'll not be here anyway".
In our case, I imagine the Sheens/Humphreys/McDonald/old board regime put all their eggs into the basket of winning the comp with the Farah/Marshall team - including doubling down on the likes of Blair. If we'd won a comp in 2010-12 I imagine they thought the fans would live with the subsequent consequences (arguably the Dragons got three or four years out of the 2010 afterglow, and anyway Bennett was off before things got nasty). And if we didn't, they all assumed they'd be gone before the mucky stuff hit the fan. As has more or less proved to be the case.
The good news is that in baseball it has been shown time and again that when you get to the stage of having a lousy team full of overpaid old guys, the best response is to completely blow it up, accept that you're going to be bad for two or three years, and start again with cheap young players. In the meantime the roster gets filled with lottery tickets: reclamation projects and long shots. What never, ever works is trying to paper over the cracks with one or two mediocre signings of yet more old players on high wages.
In baseball as in the NRL it is very clear that free agents will sign with whoever gives them the best deal, regardless of whether or not a team has done well in recent times: other than having more money, the Yankees don't have any inherent advantage in signing free agents over Toronto or Miami, say.
So assuming this really is what the Tigers are doing, and everyone who matters internally is on side, I'm all for it. I wish they'd be a bit more open about it but then again it doesn't sell a lot of memberships if you say "we're going to be garbage this year, and probably next as well". What I'm hoping for is some good signing news for 2017 to get me through what will in all likelihood be a shocking 2016.
i get where ur coming from a clean start and all, but we are not because we have already over paid teddy, moses, brooks, sirro, woods and they all come off contract at the same time, so when this comes around we will still be in the same crap.