Kasay Signs Extension

Four year deal. Locks him in through 2012.

 

Happy 39th birthday this past Monday, John. He'll be 43 at the end of that contract, which is reasonable, really.

 

2 kickers

apparently they are ok with carrying two place-kickers the next 4 years

 

so, I guess they will keep Lloyd or some other KO specialist during that time?

edit:uncd beat me to it

 

Why can't a strongleg punter do kickoffs? Is it really so different?

 

We used to do that with Sauerbrun some....he couldn't kick it like Lloyd.

 

Some have the ability, but most don't. There's an altogether different range of motion between kicking off of the ground and punting. Sauerbrun did okay at it when he was with us, except for getting penalized for thrashing someone downfield.

 

Sauerbrun and Baker both used to, I don't think TS stayed at it the whole time and I believe that Baker had a number of kicks out of bounds. Some teams do use that, and it's an eval tool used with punters, sure.

Lloyd isn't signed for four years. If the ideal is that we'll need that because of Kasay's leg strength, possibly. If we had to go back to just Kasay, we could deal with that, or find someone else, if we had to. I think the end result is that we have a kicker who's almost 40 and is playing as good of football as he ever had, he's a leader of this team and we'll do what it takes to keep him. The rest is a detail.

 

This one of those deals in which you free up money by signing a guy long term??

 

unless they lowered his salary for this year by doing so, probably not.
They probably get credit for some of the prorated, new signing bonus for this year to spread it out over five years, not four, but it's probably just a matter of getting the deal done when we did as opposed to the offseason.