Armando Salguero | NFL Senior Writer; Outkick

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Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash C-Y. That's S-E-E-W-H-Y. We're pleased to welcome NFL insider and senior writer Armando Salguero from Outkick. Also can see him on Fox News, Now and Them. Armando, there's so much that we can talk about, but since you and I are in media, this will be fun to start with. When an athlete makes the transition from his playing career to media, whether radio or TV, I often will say to him, welcome to the dark side.

Matt Ryan is the latest who makes this jump. He's going to work as an analyst for CBS and the NFL and CBS, but he says the door is not closed on his playing career. So why jump into a broadcast booth? Because we all need jobs, Amy. We gotta work. You gotta feed the kids.

You gotta pay the mortgage. And you know, Matt's no different than anybody else. Having said that, he is, I wouldn't say he's going kicking and screaming, but he's not going without giving up the game without a fight. He wants the door to be open. The way that I see this playing out is the only way that he is able to get back in the league is if a team that has a good amount of chance of being in the playoffs during the season and they have an injury to their starting quarterback, and they need someone to come in and kind of save them at the very least towards the end of the season, even if it's not right away because he's going to have to learn the system and so forth. Maybe at that point that's the opening for him, but obviously no one is beating down his door and saying, come be our starter, you know, and compete during, or even compete during training camps.

So it's a good idea that he is moving on to the next phase of his life while still being able to keep the last phase of his life, which has been pretty great, open. Honestly, I never thought of him as a great talker, and then I think about the fact that Tom Brady will also be jumping into broadcasting. Which of those two guys do you think will be the better broadcaster just for fun, Armando?

And then we'll go back and we'll replay this when they actually both get into the booth. Yeah, no, I'm rooting for Matt Ryan because Tom Brady has seven rings and the other guy went up 28-3 and did win. So maybe post-career, you know, we can flip the script a little bit and Ryan comes out the superior broadcaster and Brady kind of like, it's hard for me to accept that Tom Brady's a good looking guy. He was married to a supermodel. Before that he dated a movie star.

He won seven Super Bowls and now he's going to be great at broadcasting too. I mean, come on. It's not right. It's not fair to the rest of humanity.

All right, then. Matt Ryan and Carson Wentz are connected, of course, the six degrees of separation. Is there a future there for Carson? If there's no future for Matt Ryan, what about Carson Wentz? Yeah, I think Carson Wentz's time as the starting quarterback in the NFL is over. And, you know, he's got to hope that a team would be open to bringing him in, you know, as a backup type and again in an emergency situation as a backup type. Obviously, he's not signed yet. I don't know if he'll be signed by the start of training camp. In short spurts, I think Carson Wentz is fine. From what we've seen of his career, he is capable, you know, three, four games. It seems like teams find the magic formula for him, figure him out, and suddenly things go south. And that's the problem or one of the problems that he's struggled with during his career. I'm pulling for him. I think he's a good person and he's young and certainly he's staying in shape. So it's not the last chapter on the Carson Wentz book has not been written.

But obviously, it needs a little refreshing and needs a little updating for it to get a little better. We've seen, as is typical, a bunch of quarterbacks change teams, but we also saw several teams draft quarterbacks in the first round with the idea that they will be starting sooner rather than later. What are a couple fits between teams and QBs that you really like?

I like the Colts with Anthony Richardson. I was at the draft and I was around Anthony Richardson and he is an impressive dude. And I'm not talking physically, although you watch the tape and physically, he is a very impressive person as an athlete. I mean, he could do things. That guy ran away from the LSU secondary on like a 70-yard run last year.

So you got to be some kind of athlete to be able to do that. But as a person, I just like his demeanor. I like his maturity. I like how he approaches things. Nothing seems to rattle him, which is going to serve him, by the way, his rookie year and beyond. And I like the fit in Indianapolis in that you've got Shane Siken who helped Justin Herbert and then helped develop Jalen Hurts. And so if you're talking about a QB developer with a QB that needs developing, I think that's a good marriage. Armando Salguero is with us from Outkick. We're talking NFL. It might be mid-May, but it's never a dull moment in the National Football League after hours with Amy Lawrence here on CBS Sports Radio. It was interesting this week to hear Joe Burrow not only keep what he knows of the negotiations with the Bengals to himself.

I do appreciate that. But he also did make the point that he doesn't need to break the bank if it hurts his team's ability to then go out and either resign or pick up competent pieces. Similar to, say, what the Chiefs have done around Patrick Mahomes.

How does that work out when we're talking about astronomical amounts of money? Well, first of all, it works out for Joe Burrow in that he's going to get an astronomical amount of money. But it's pretty impressive that at 24 years old, 25 years old, he realizes that it's not all about him. He said very clearly this week, look, great quarterbacks can't be great quarterbacks without great players around them. You don't hear every single QB one saying that.

You hear a lot of QB one saying, you know, I'll lift the team and, you know, the tide will rise for everybody. This guy realizes that even at his young age, that if he has a good support system, if he has players that are stars around him, he's going to be able to be a star. And he obviously does because Jamar Chase is a star. T Higgins has been outstanding. Both of them are 1,000-yard receivers, and both of them are going to be paid and need to be paid. Chase, obviously, is going to be looking for an extension next year. Higgins needs a contract for next year. So the money has to be distributed in a way that Joe Burrow, I think, understands you can't really lose a whole bunch of guys and just keep going because I'm Joe Burrow and I'll make Joe Blow, the wide receiver, really great.

No, that's not how it works. And you got to kind of bow to the fact that he realizes that. The Giants, they had to make a choice between signing their quarterback and franchise tagging their running back, which is what they ended up doing. What is the latest with Saquon Barkley? Would they like to give him a contract if they could figure out common ground? Saquon has turned down a couple of offers already. They want to sign him to a contract because right now they have him on a franchise tag, which by the way, he hasn't signed yet. But nonetheless, it's costing the Giants $10 million in cap space. If they can sign them to a long-term contract, they probably are going to save a good amount of cap space the first couple of years.

They have an interest in doing that. It probably would be in Saquon Barkley's best interest to do that. But he's got apparently a number in his head, and it's north of $14 million a year. Right now, the highest paid running back in the NFL is Christian McCaffrey.

And I think he's no higher than $15 or $16 million a year. It's pretty clear where Saquon Barkley is aiming. He wants to be at the top of the heap.

Obviously, they need to come to some sort of agreement. Otherwise, Saquon's not going to show up for this offseason until he needs to. And I don't know how he's going to handle training camp. Let's talk about Dalvin Cook, because this one kind of blows me away. What's the latest with him and the Vikings? Yeah, Dalvin Cook is from South Florida.

And I'm from South Florida. And I love Dalvin Cook. I understand that the Vikings don't want a running back with a $14 million cap hit. And I think it goes to $15 million next year.

Next year. And I understand that this year, or last year, rather, he had his lowest yards per carry average of his career. But it wasn't like terrible. It was 4.4 yards a carry. And you know, I saw him run through that Buffalo defense on the way to 65 yard touchdown for Minnesota.

So he is still a dynamic player. They've asked him to take a pay cut. He told them, No, thank you. I don't think I do. Thank you.

No, thanks. They've talked trade with some teams. As far as I know, those teams have been calling the Vikings. I'm not sure how the whether the Vikings are calling those teams.

And so far, nothing. I think that most teams believe the Vikings will be forced to cut Dalvin Cook. Dalvin Cook is on the market in June or July. You know, someone is going to decide not to give them $14 million a year. But at the very least, they are going to do better than what the Vikings were offering to do in a pay cut. Still so much happening, even though it's mid May. Armando Salguero is with us from Outkick.

It's after hours CBS Sports Radio. The commanders are at least in agreement for a sale. $6.05 billion.

That's a billion with a B, billion dollars. What do you think, Armando, a change in DC with the ownership of that football team could mean not just for the franchise, but for the league? Relief. They don't have to worry about the next shoe to drop coming from one of their legacy franchises. You got to remember, once upon a time, the Washington franchise, back when they were called the Redskins, were a premier, premier franchise. They won a bunch of Super Bowls under Joe Gibbs. They had star players, the Hogs, John Riggins, Daryl Green, all of that.

And they were on Thanksgiving against the Cowboys, and they were on Monday nights, and they were on Sunday nights. And all of a sudden, in the last 15, 20 years or so, it's just different. It's not that. They're not it anymore.

And they just shoot themselves in the foot. And so all the time, it seems, and of course, there is that stuff about the congressional investigations and so forth, and the Mary Joe White investigation. NFL ownership is relieved that Daniel Snyder won't be the owner of that team any longer. The NFL is meeting next week for their annual summer meeting. They're not going to vote on the Washington Commander's sale, so it's too early for that. But my guess is, before this season begins, they will be under new ownership. And beyond that, the next step will be getting them back to D.C., I think. They want to be close to the footprint of the old RFK Stadium, is something that has legs. I think the local government has offered to put up a billion dollars. It's going to cost way more than a billion dollars to build a stadium there. But nonetheless, it's a new day for that team.

It's a refresh that I think everyone is happy to see. The league is certainly synonymous with cash. I mean, it is a golden goose when it comes to cash flow with revenue. The latest is this deal for $110 million with NBC Universal to put two whole games on the Peacock Network, including a wild card game, next January. Armando, I've asked my listeners, and a lot of them say they're maxed out when it comes to streaming services. Some of them say they're not going to pay for a streaming service. They're not going to pay for a streaming service simply to watch a playoff game. What's your reaction to this migration more and more in the NFL and other sports, too, moving to streaming services? Yeah, they're moving to widen their ability to make money, get new eyes on the product.

They're happy to do it with Amazon, with Peacock, with YouTube, as you know. It's the future, and I don't see how it's going to change. I think that the cow or the horse has left the barn. Some farm animal has left the barn. The barn is empty, and some farm animal is out in the field watching a streaming service.

And so that has happened, and neither you nor I in the barn trying to pick up after those dang animals is going to change that. Do they care about how many animals are watching their streaming service? Do they care about the numbers? Of course they care, and that's the reason that they tried at the spring meetings, they being the NFL owners, to institute changes to the Thursday night Amazon Prime schedule to where now teams can appear more than once during a season. And there was even a movement afoot to try to, at the end of the year, to have the schedule be able to flex those games. Because at the end of last year, some of those Thursday night games were just bad, bad matchups between teams that were very disappointing. And the audience share showed that. So they're trying to do things that will prevent and will kind of keep those streaming services from balking at the price that they're paying. They want to give them premier matchups while at the same time serving their traditional television partners.

Even now in 2023, the NFL is attempting to reinvent itself and doing so with fistfuls of cash. You can find Armando Salguero on Twitter with exactly that. And I think that you should be able to spell it exactly as it sounds. Right, Armando? Yes. As it's spelled in Nebraska, Salguero, like they spell it in Nebraska. You make me laugh.

We always laugh. He is the senior NFL writer for Outkick, and it's our privilege to have him here on the show. Gracias mi Armando. Anytime, Amy. My pleasure y bendiciones. Little late with this promo. Listen for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Donate today at your local CSL plasma center and be rewarded for your generosity.