Unfortunately his salary this year became guaranteed before we even made the final decision to release DeSean :/. Idk why we set Casey's contract up like that, seems like an odd thing to do for a theoretical 3rd string TE who barely does shit on Special Teams.. (Should've just taken the $2M hit in dead money IMO).
We're going to give him one more season (this season) because then we don't owe him anything.. if he performs well then we'll restructure his last year for sure.. I'll be pissed if we stick to giving him like 4.5 mil :/ especially since Keller is sitting out there and he is supposedly looking for a 1 yr deal for the same amount of money. Granted Keller is injury prone but I'd rather have him in there as a rotational TE then James Casey who barely makes any plays on ST and then when he's lined up on offense he can barely block and doesn't quite have the ability to dodge coverage.
I definitely don't expect Casey to be around next season for us as we have Emil Igwenagu sitting pretty on a $660k contract that could very well provide the same results (assuming Casey doesn't have a monster season for whatever reason this year).
