Chiefs 2019 Secondary:
To Berry or Not to Berry
by Paul Pulley | February 4, 2019
The Kansas City Chiefs safety, Eric Berry, while a very good player when healthy, has been injury prone throughout much of his career. Out of 151 games (including playoffs) that Berry has been eligible to play in as a Chief, he has missed 56 of them due to injury or illness. That’s just over 37% of games missed for his career. As the highest paid safety in the NFL, that’s a lot of money to throw away on one player that misses more than 1 out of every 3 games (Special note: The Chiefs have played in 152 games in Berry’s career, but Berry, along with most of the starters, sat out week 17 versus the San Diego Chargers in 2013).
In the last two seasons, due to multiple reasons, Berry has only played in 4 games of the 35 games the team has played and only one of those was a complete game. Considering 3 of those 4 games were just partial games, Berry has missed over 90% of the playing time in the last 2 years.
Looking at some of the highest paid safeties in the league, namely Reshad Jones, Earl Thomas and Devin McCourty, three players that have been in the league for the same 9 years as Berry, they have all played in at least 125 games of their careers. In the case of McCourty, playing for the New England Patriots and all of their post season games. At the conclusion of this years Super Bowl, McCourty will have played in 161 games in his 9 year career. With Berry playing in 95 games in that same 9 year span, if the best ability is availability, Eric Berry fails miserably. Now that Berry has reached the dreaded 30 years of age plateau, it’s hard to imagine that his ability to stay healthy will ever improve.
I hear and read so much that Berry is a leader and a general on the field, and how much the defense is better with him. That may have been true at one time, but I don’t believe that to be valid any longer. The Chiefs went 13-5 in 2018, they were 13-2 in the games Berry missed and 0-3 in the games he played in. While it’s also true that Berry could help because he knew the defensive scheme inside and out, with the firing of DC Bob Sutton and bringing in new DC Steve Spagnuolo and a new defensive system, that is no longer the case.
It’s also been said that Berry can’t be cut in 2019 because of the cap situation. While it’s 100% true that releasing Berry this year would incur almost $15 million of dead money, if he is kept, he has a 2019 cap hit of $16.5 M and cutting him in 2020 would still leave $8M of dead money. So keeping Berry through 2019 would involve $24.5 million of cap space whether he is able to play or not, versus just under the $15M to replace him now.
Shoot, Berry’s cap hit in 2018 was $13M, and that was essentially dead money for no more than he contributed, and he used up a roster spot that could have went to a player that could get on the field.
Releasing Berry now would only save just over $1.5M cap space, but in 2018, the safety market was extremely depressed with some very good safeties playing for about that amount, including Kenny Vaccaro, Eric Reid and Adrian Phillips. Tre Boston played in 2018 for about $2.5M. All of the players mentioned above signed just 1 year deals in 2018 and they will all be available at the beginning of the new league year. Plus there will be others such as HaHa Clinton-Dix and possibly Landon Collins. There will be safeties available for the 2019 season that can actually be depended upon to stay on the field and contribute.
Another option for the release of Berry would be to use the Post June 1 designation. What this does is allow a team to spread dead money out over a two year period. The money that would be dead money for the current year is all that counts against the current years cap, while all future monies that would count as dead money is applied to the following season’s cap. In Berry’s case, this would move $8 million to the 2020 cap as dead money, therefore the cap savings for 2019 would be $9.55M. The caveat to this Post June 1 usage is that the team has to carry the full amount of the cap hit until June 1, which means the additional $8M of cap savings for 2019 would not be available to use until June 2nd. This could still be put to very good use, for instance, signing draft picks or extending current players or even saving for a later use such as signing players from other teams after roster cut downs in the fall.
While there are a lot of things about the “Patriots Way” that are unconscionable, such as filming opponents practices or deflating balls or possibly getting ahold of an opponent’s early game scripted plays (does anyone else find it peculiar how well the Pats defense was able to stymie the Chiefs offense early in the game), one thing I can agree with, is how the Patriots don’t hesitate to rid themselves of players that are declining in productivity and not worth the cap value they command.
Personally, I’m not holding out much hope that the Chiefs will move on from Eric Berry in 2019, even though I think they should. I also have no confidence that he can return to his pre-2017 playing ability.
Paul Pulley — ArrowheadOne
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