Cowboys player contract parameters?

[Coogiguy03]

Hey Cowboys family, pretty boring these days without football, I just wanted to touch on the contracts of players on this team.

We sign our players to deals as they should be, but later in the contract we restructure money in the contract to push money down the road. Now I've heard plenty of people on here sat that this is built into the contracts upon signing the deal. But then what happens when have to the up paying that huge number, we again have to restructure again.

My question is, why can't we front load the contract when the player is actually coming off a good season(s) to get the new deal. You'd expect them in the first two years to still be on their PEAK, as opposed to back loading the deal when the player is several years into the contract and their play maybe has declined for whatever reason. I mean how many big deals have we signed over the years, and players didn't pan out all the way through the deal, yet at the end of the deal there's a huge cap number.

Could someone please help me understand this, hope everyone is having a great summer!

 

[Aerolithe_Lion]

There are 3 primary reasons you don’t want to do this:

1. Your idea of balancing the contract around diminishing talent is the opposite of what you want to do. If CeeDee is at his best now and won’t be later, then what you want to do is maximize his value to the team when he’s at his best. To do this, you’ll want to surround him with as much talent as possible while the window is open for CeeDee to dominate. You want the cap space when he’s good; it doesn’t make a lot of sense to limit your cap now, and then have the space when you’re not good enough to take advantage of it. Get all your talent together at the same time, get them as low as possible in cap hits, and then add as much talent as possible in the open space. Is going 12-5 every year and fizzing out the best case scenario, or would it be better to go 14-3 every few years and have real title shots?

2. Immediate, Severe Change in Cap Hit.
This is particularly poignant in guys still on their rookie deal. Let’s say CeeDee gets the 35m$ AAV deal over 5 years. What you’re asking then is to have him be a 40-50m$ cap hit the first couple years of his deal, then be a bit less than 35m$ the last few years in case he starts to suck. The problem with this is today CeeDee is an 18m$ cap hit. We need to find 22m$. Not a lot of guys save you much money by outright cutting them, so you would need to cut a large amount of players to stay under the cap. It would be detrimental to the team to do this. And now imagine doing that to CeeDee AND Micah. Or next year with Micah AND Tyler Smith AND Bland. It’s not feasible.

3. Cash is worth more now than it is later, so save it. Right now the cap is 255m$. Giving a player 50m$ right now is 20% of the total cap. However, if you were to push that money back, back, back into 2027, when the cap is 300m$+, suddenly that 50m$ is only 15% of the cap. Now if you keep pushing everyone’s contracts back like that, 2024’s team is now running on 2027’s cap space, and you have more room to sign guys than other teams do. It can bite you if you pick the wrongs guys, but in general the benefit far outweighs the risk. It’s like getting a loan from the bank with a negative interest.

 

[Flamma]

Hey Cowboys family, pretty boring these days without football, I just wanted to touch on the contracts of players on this team.

We sign our players to deals as they should be, but later in the contract we restructure money in the contract to push money down the road. Now I've heard plenty of people on here sat that this is built into the contracts upon signing the deal. But then what happens when have to the up paying that huge number, we again have to restructure again.

My question is, why can't we front load the contract when the player is actually coming off a good season(s) to get the new deal. You'd expect them in the first two years to still be on their PEAK, as opposed to back loading the deal when the player is several years into the contract and their play maybe has declined for whatever reason. I mean how many big deals have we signed over the years, and players didn't pan out all the way through the deal, yet at the end of the deal there's a huge cap number.

Could someone please help me understand this, hope everyone is having a great summer!

The Lion pretty much went into great detail as to why. He pretty much covers this. But you backload the contract because the salary cap goes up. A 15M dollar cap hit will be the same as a 25M dollar cap hit is the following year. Front loading the contract makes no sense. That's the simple version.