It does but from my understanding it counts differently and things get front loaded or back loaded. Cans get kicked down the road and teams spread it out, treat it as neverending and as the cap goes up things get washed. That's all I know.
A salary cap guru might be able to better explain it. There used to be a guy here that was great at explaining stuff like this. Lol
Yes, in essence, this is accurate. But at some point, a team does have to account on the cap for cash spent. It all depends on the contract structure, etc.
Many teams buy into the theory of the ever growing cap and use higher signing bonuses, dummy years, etc. to essentially borrower from future years. Now all teams will spread bonuses out, for example, but some are way more aggressive than others. The Cowboys tend to be the least aggressive when it comes to that stuff.
It is also about timing, etc. The Cowboys can actually lower Lamb's cap hit this year if he signs a new deal. Why? Because they can utilize prorated rules, etc. to pay him a big bonus now and spread it out over multiple years. Which is why some fans advocated for the Cowboys to try to sign him after the 2023 season so that cap space created could have been used by the Cowboys this past FA. But, based on reports, the Cowboys basically did little until recently in terms of getting him extended.
The fact they were not all that aggressive in trying to get him signed earlier tells me that they wanted to appear cap constrained during the height of FA because they simply did not want to spend money on FAs.
