What's up everybody?

Welcome into the next Pats podcast.

I'm Phil Perry.

We have a little bit of an emergency podcast situation on our hands here

for the Patriots have traded Stefan Gilmore to the Carolina Panthers for a 2023 sixth round

pick. Let's dive into the details, how we got here, what it means for the Patriots now,

and of course, what it means for them moving forward. This is the next Pat's podcast after all.

So how did we get here?

I think you have to go all the way back to last off season before the 2020 season

where Stefan Gilmore was given essentially a cash advance on his 2020 salary,

given a bump where money was taken from his 2021 salary and moved to last year.

So he was paid on a plane similar to some of the other top corners in football, though still not at the top of the league.

And the expectation was at that point that the Patriots and Gilmore would be able to come to some sort of agreement going into this season because his base salary was so low.

He was set to play for a $7 million salary in 2021.

And that's where the issues arose.

But we have to take into account the fact that Gilmore season ended due to a

torn quad last season. So then coming into this season, he tells Josina Anderson, he can be ready

to play in training camp if he has to be and that he just wants what he's worth. So it's pretty clearly,

even at that point in early July, well before training camp, that he was looking

for a new contract and that this was more of a contractual disagreement than an injury

situation. But the fact that Gilmore was coming off an injury, the fact that he was set to

go into his 31-year-old season with the Patriots provided a little bit of a hurdle,

...