Salary Cap 101: Average Salary != Cap Hit

[thefuzz]

I too like the idea of using a combined $50,000,000 worth of cap space for an underwhelming Quarterback, an off ball, non pass rushing LB, and a running back next season.

And don't forget that 11M in dead cap due to us bringing back KK this year for no reason.

[Jon Snow]

Teddy is not worth half of what they are paying him.  It's still a bad signing no matter how you slice it.

[R0CKnR0LLA]

OP is off base with this. Every dollar you pay a player is going to hit your cap regardless. You can, though, structure a contract in a way to basically make the cap hits each year whatever you want them to be. But you're just pushing cap hits around, not changing the amount that's going to hit the cap in total.

So when we pay a player $20 million, that means there's going to be $20 million hitting the cap. Might not all hit on the current year, but it HAS to hit the cap at some point. So saying "yeah we're paying him $21 mill, but his cap hit is only $14 mill!" is really misguided. All that means is that we moved $7 mill in cap hit into the future.

The best way to evaluate a contract is to look at what the player is actually getting paid year in and year out (AKA yearly cash). For Bridgewater, he's getting $24 million this year. That's $24 million that WILL hit the cap at some point, even if we cut him. We've just broken up the cap hit so $14 mill hits this year and the other $10 hits in the future.

[R0CKnR0LLA]

As an example, the Panthers could have (if they wanted) structured Bridgewaters contract so that his cap hit this year was only $9 million, while still paying him the exact same $24 million for 2020.

Does that mean his total cap his for playing this year would be only $9 million? No, it just means you pushed the other $15 million into the future. The total cap hit still ends up being whatever you pay him, in this case $24 million.

[Peon Awesome]

Great all around post. I just want to expand a bit on the Teddy aspect.

Teddy basically got the cheapest contract for a veteran starter in the NFL at that point. We were paying him to be our starter. Huddlers complaints should really be with Joe Brady who pushed for the organization to sign him. When you go to the negotiating table to a free agent and you say "Here's our offer. We're going to make you the lowest paid entrenched veteran starter in the NFL with a contract that gives us easy wiggle room to get out, but at least we're paying you like a starter and handing you the starting job with no competition in 2020." That's basically the minimum they could offer that would get him to forego all further free agency discussions and sign. We could play hardball and wait for the market to demonstrate itself, and in hindsight seeing as how utterly depressed the market was, would have been the right call, but again that goes back to Brady telling Hurney "You need to sign this guy to run my offense." If that's the position we were taking, that contract makes sense. If we were simply desperate for any upgrade from Kyle Allen and Will Grier, it doesn't make any sense to jump the gun and give Teddy that contract. If you're going to make arguments, argue that it was stupid of Brady and the organization to prioritize Bridgewater that badly to jump the market and not wait to see that it would become a dead market for qbs, instead giving him a contract that valued him where he basically is, i.e. low end starter.

And if you're going to argue that the value Teddy brings doesn't equate to his contract, no argument here but again the market dictates salary regardless of value and the market for a low end starter is TB's contract. You're basically rehashing the same argument against giving a RB a big contract: is the value over getting some mid-round rookie really worth the cost? That's the argument. But you can't just go to a running back and say "It's not worth paying you what the market says, so even though your peers are getting $15 million per year and we really want to keep you, we're not going to do that." Bottom line: Teddy got the contract that the historical market dictated and the problem shouldn't be the contract but our decision to jump out ahead and make his signing a priority.

[1of10Charnatives]

@Icege Great write up! Chock full of good information and analysis that runs contrary to short attention span theater crowd thinking. I feel better informed about the team's cap situation and less worried about the deals you talked about as a result. Kudos to you.

[musicman]

On 12/18/2020 at 11:22 AM, thefuzz said:

I too like the idea of using a combined $50,000,000 worth of cap space for an underwhelming Quarterback, an off ball, non pass rushing LB, and a running back next season.

And don't forget that 11M in dead cap due to us bringing back KK this year for no reason.

If we cut KK it would have been close to 20M cap hit. There's your reason, you still needed DT's, just didn't know he would get hurt again. 

[YoungPanthers89]

Mariota > Ted