Ryan Poles

He played physical.

Those are the things that D.A.

is looking for, that we're looking for.

We thought there was leadership there.

He's young.

And, you know, we had to kind of adapt to that.

And we had an opportunity to bring a really good player in.

And that's the decision that we made.

It's really difficult.

I talked about this earlier, but especially when you win games, you create this really deep relationships and you see guys help you get to the next level.

So when you have to pick and choose and really try to live in different spaces cap wise, it can be really difficult and it's hard to turn the emotional side off of it.

But at the end of the day, we got to do what's best for our organization.

I'm really fortunate to have Matt Feinstein.

I think he's one of the best cap guys in the league.

He gives us a lot of different scenarios for us to operate in, but also showing us the short-term and long-term effect of each one of those decisions.

Because we want to stay in that sweet spot where we have maximum amount of flexibility as we move on, not only from this year, but three years down the road.

I hope eventually to have a quarterback situation, too, where we've got to pay a young quarterback.

So that comes into play as well.

I think we're getting closer and closer to clarity on that side of things, which helps us start to build those models to make sure that, again, we're doing the right thing for us moving forward and we're not putting ourselves in a situation where we've got to make really tough or bad decisions down the road that hurt us.

Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest.