How the Kansas City Chiefs can free up significant cap space
By Scott Loring
4. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif & Cam Erving
When you have the league’s single-most valuable asset in Mahomes, you have the responsibility to protect him. If you’re looking for the bargain bin, this isn’t the place to look. Not now. The Chiefs have to keep Mahomes upright or else everything changes.
That said, decisions around the salary cap have to balance investment and return. The Chiefs are in pretty good shape at offensive tackle with two Pro Bowlers, Eric Fisher and Mitchell Schwartz. The current state of the interior line is a little more murky. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif is not a bad player by any stretch of the imagination. But his $8.9 million cap number in 2020 makes him the ninth-highest paid Chief, and that brings his contract to question.
LDT has three years remaining on his deal, and while he didn’t dominate in 2019, my guess is the Chiefs retain him in 2020. He committed just three penalties all season while allowing only two sacks. He will be the veteran that offensive line coach Andy Heck looks to for leadership with younger players like Austin Reiter, Martinas Rankin, and Nick Allegretti.
Releasing Duvernay-Tardif would save the Chiefs almost $5 million against the salary cap, but it also sends a bad message to the locker room, and it doesn’t seem like that is the culture that Veach and Reid are building.
If there is an offensive lineman who is on his way out, it is swing tackle Cameron Erving. The team has a club option on the former Florida State Seminole in 2020, but it just doesn’t seem feasible to bring him back. The option will cost the Chiefs almost $4.7 million against the cap, but on the other hand, it would cost nothing for the Chiefs to let him go.
Erving stepped in for Fisher when the latter went down in Week 2. He played nine games in his stead, allowing five sacks and committing seven penalties. He’s one of the highest-paid non-starting offensive linemen in football.
There’s no nice way to say it; Erving is going to be a free agent.