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Some teams hand out bigger contracts than others, but you may be surprised to see where NFC East teams rank when it comes to the number of players with the highest 2015 salary cap numbers at their positions.
As per 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, here's how much cap room each of the NFC East teams has:
Dallas Cowboys: $12,803,844
Philadelphia Eagles: $10,551,685
New York Giants: $7,141,331
Washington Commanders: $6,729,608
That doesn't mean of course that the Cowboys have been particularly frugal (Hardy's contract could eat up a lot of that space, depending on how many games he plays), or that the Commanders have been handing out bloated contracts, far from it. But instead of taking a deep-dive into each team's cap situation, today let's look at the NFC East All-Cap team - the players with the highest 2015 salary cap numbers at their positions. We've listed "Starters" and "Backups" in the table below, the starters are the players with the highest cap hit at their positions, the backups have the second highest cap hit.
NFC EAST ALL-CAP TEAM: Offense
POS Starter Backup
Quarterback Eli Manning, Giants ($19.8 million) Tony Romo, Cowboys ($15.0 million)POS Starter Backup
Running back DeMarco Murray ($5.0 million) Darren Sproles, Eagles ($4.1 million)
Wide Receiver 1 Dez Bryant, Cowboys ($12.8 million) Victor Cruz, Giants ($7.4 million)
Wide Receiver 2 Pierre Garcon, Commanders ($9.7 million) Riley Cooper, Eagles ($4.8 million)
Wide Receiver 3 DeSean Jackson, Commanders ($9.3 million) Andre Roberts, Commanders ($3.8 million)
Tight End Jason Witten, Cowboys ($8.5 million) Brent Celek, Eagles ($4.8 million)
Left Tackle Trent Williams, Commanders ($13.7 million) Jason Peters, Eagles ($9.1 million)
Left Guard Evan Mathis, Eagles ($6.5 million) Shawn Lauvao, Commanders ($4.0 million)
Center Jason Kelce, Eagles ($4.4 million) Kory Lichtensteiger, Commanders ($4.3 million)
Right Guard Chris Chester, Commanders ($4.8 million) Geoff Schwartz, Giants ($3.2 million)
Right Tackle Lane Johnson, Eagles ($5.2 million) Doug Free, Cowboys ($3.0 million)
NFC EAST ALL-CAP TEAM: Defense
POS Starter Backup
Edge Rusher 1 Jason Pierre-Paul, Giants ($14.8 million) Ryan Kerrigan, Commanders ($7.0 million)POS Starter Backup
Edge Rusher 2 Connor Barwin, Eagles ($7.0 million) Trent Cole, Eagles ($6.0 million)
Interior Defender 1 Jason Hatcher, Commanders ($5.3 million) Terrance Knighton, Commanders ($4.5 million)
Interior Defender 2 Stephen Paea, Commanders ($4.3 million) Fletcher Cox, Eagles ($3.3 million)
Linebacker 1 Sean Lee, Cowboys ($5.5 million) Jameel McClain, Giants ($3.4 million)
Linebacker 2 Jon Beason, Giants ($4.1 million) DeMeco Ryans, Eagles ($3.0 million)
Linebacker 3 Perry Riley, Commanders ($4.0 million) Rolando McClain, Cowboys ($2.8 million)
Cornerback 1 Brandon Carr, Cowboys ($12.7 million) Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, Giants ($7.3 million)
Cornerback 2 Byron Maxwell, Eagles ($8.7 million) Prince Amukamara, Giants ($6.9 million)
Safety 1 Malcolm Jenkins, Eagles ($5.7 million) Barry Church, Cowboys ($3.3 million)
Safety 2 Dashon Goldson, Commanders ($4.0 million) Chris Maragos, Eagles ($1.4 million)
NFC EAST ALL-CAP TEAM: Special Teams
POS Starter Backup
Kicker Dan Bailey, Cowboys ($2.5 million) Kai Forbath, Commanders ($1.5 million)POS Starter Backup
Punter Steve Weatherford, Giants ($3.1 million) Donnie Jones, Eagles ($2.1 million)
Keep in mind that the cap charge is just funny money used for accounting purposes, and should not be confused with team strength or anything like that. But the table above does provide an interesting look at how teams allocate their cap resources.
Overall the Eagles have the most players on this All-Cap team with 15, followed by the Commanders (13) and Giants (12). The Cowboys bring up the rear with just eight players. And it's a similar picture when you look at the cap dollars each team has allocated to their top players:
Eagles Commanders Giants Cowboys
Players in All-Cap Team 16 14 9 9
Total Cap Hit $81.1 million $80.2 million $70 million $66.1 million
Obviously, these numbers offer just a snapshot of the current situation. Greg Hardy's cap hit for example is currently artificially low at $3.2 million, and that would increase with every game that he plays. But the fact remains that the other teams are investing more into these players than the Cowboys do, while having even less cap space left. How can that be?
Outside of the cap space of $143 million determined by the NFL for 2015, two key factors play a role in how much cap space teams actually have available to invest into their players.
Previous Year Carryover: "Carryover" is a relatively new term in NFL salary capology. The 2011 CBA introduces this concept, which allows each team to roll over unused cap space from one year to the next. Nominally, the $143 million is the amount of money available for each team to spend. But adding carryover from 2014 is what sets the de facto cap limit for each team. The Cowboys only had $3.3 million in carryover from 2014 to boost their 2015 cap.
Dead Money: Dead money is a salary cap charge for players that are no longer on a team’s roster, but for whom the team still carries a salary cap charge. When a player is released or traded, the remaining unamortized part of his signing bonus (and salary components that are treated like a signing bonus) accelerate immediately into his team’s current salary cap. Because dead money counts against a team's total cap space, that leaves less money to invest into the current roster. The Cowboys have some sizable chunks of dead money counting against the 2015 cap from Miles Austin ($5.1 million), Doug Free's restructured contract ($4 million), Kyle Orton ($2.2 million) and many other players for a total dead money charge in 2015 of $12.9 million. Still a lot, but waaay down from the 2014 total of $26.1 million.
Here's how the carryover and the dead money adds up for the four NFC East teams:
Eagles Giants Commanders Cowboys
2014 NFL salary Cap $143 million $143 million $143 million $143 million
Carryover $15.7 million $7.1 million $0.1 million $3.3 million
Dead Money -$12.7 million -$8.9 million -$7.1 million -$12.9 million
"Available" cap $146 million $141.2 million $136 million $133.4 million
"Available" cap is the amount of cap space each team had available in 2015 for player contracts. Again, we are talking accounting money here, and teams can stretch that "available" cap quite significantly by restructuring existing contracts, but the number shows that in 2015, the Cowboys are structurally at a disadvantage of $8 million to $12 million versus the Giants and Eagles - although that gap has shrunk significantly. In 2014, the Cowboys had $32 million less available money than the Eagles, and $16 million less than the Giants.
When you looked over the NFC East All-Cap team, you may have felt good about the fact that the Cowboys "only" had eight players on the list, and assumed that this was a sign of prudent cap management. It's not, at least not in the Cowboys' case, as the Cowboys' hand was forced by salary cap constraints. If the Cowboys had had the room to maneuver that the Eagles had, DeMarco Murray might still be with the Cowboys, and Dez Bryant might already have signed a long-term contract extensions. Though in both cases factors other than the available cap space played a role.
There is one positive though: the numbers may not look stellar in 2015, but the salary cap crunch of the previous years forced the Cowboys to make a number of decisions that will put them in a much better salary cap position going forward, chief among them the decision to get younger. The Cowboys are the youngest team in the NFC East by quite a margin, and they are paying their young players what the CBA dictates: very little.
The final things that stands out as you look over the many names on the list above is the distribution of free agents. Of the Cowboys' nine players, only two are free agent acquisitions (Carr and McClain). That's quite different for the other teams:
Eagles Commanders Giants Cowboys
Players in All-Cap Team 16 14 9 9
of which Free Agent acquisitions 10 10 5 2
The Cowboys have drafted well in recent years, and it's paying off. Lots of quality guys are playing on rookie contracts and more and more of the free agents they are bringing in are role players, and not other team's starters that they would have to pay accordingly.
And that's a good place to be in.
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