There have already been posts already lamenting our cap circumstance going into next year. We do have a lot of important FA and the status quo sees us right up next to the cap. I cannot blame anyone for the concern, this does look like a promising team and it is hard to build on something if you keep removing pieces. I too think it important.
What drew my ire was an assertion that if we wanted to keep Murray, we would be required to cut Witten. This is precisely that lazy, oversimplified, and myopic approach that I hate. I am a firm believer that if you want to understand something you need to break it down into it's constituent parts and look at all of them. Instead what I was seeing was like talking about the performance of a car and only looking at the tires. Do the tires matter? Obviously that is the case but just as obvious it hardly is going to tell you how the car is going to perform on the track. Fixating on one part and waving your hands is not a good argument.
Well I have decided that instead of only *****ing, I would do something about it as well and thus this post.
First of all, I would like the recommend the site overthecap.com or sportrac.com for salary cap information. It is not 100% accurate so the specifics are subject to change but overall they both are quite good as a source of information. For this exercise, I used overthecap and the link for the 2015 figures is
HERE.
Voila, all of the accounting for the 2015 Cowboys roster right at your fingertips.
Here are the Cowboys top dozen salaries and the numbers in parentheses are the amount of the total that is guaranteed. That does not mean add the two numbers together. It means subtract them and that is the amount you don't have to pay if you make a cut. Outside of a couple exception like Okoye, the remainder of the roster are still on rookie deals. Remember this is a very young team.
1 Romo $17m ($7.5m)
2 Smith $11m ($11m)
3 Melton $9m
4 Carr $8m
5 Free $8m
6 Witten $5.1m
7 Lee $2.5m
8 Claiborne $2.6m ($2.6m)
9 Church $1.75m
10 Bailey $1.7m
11 Scandrick $1.5m
12 Bernadeau $1.5m
First of all, look at Witten's 2015 salary. It's $5.1m. That right there is where the argument should end about cutting Witten. He is easily worth $5.1m relative to the franchise TE tag of over $8m. OTOH, let's look at the players around him. Other likely candidates for knee jerk reaction cuts are Scandrick, Claiborne, and Lee but as you can easily see all are either guaranteed their salaries or have low salaries for NFL starters.
OTOH, top candidates for restructures or the axe are Melton, Carr, Free, and Bernadeau. I will look at the cut options here in a bit but lets look at the teams situation as well as the outlook for earnings across the league first.
The top 51 salaries for the Cowboys going into next year is $138m. The cap last year was $133m so we are $5m in the hole. Last year the cap went up 8% and I see that as the minimum increase at least for the immediate future. There are two reasons. First, 2015 will be 4 full years into the new CBA and the last vestiges of accounting controls deducting from the players share for 'expenses' and the like is now gone completely. Second is the massive yearly multimbillion dollar deal the NFL signed with DirectTV.
That gives me a low end increase of $10.4m but the high end could be much much higher. Let's look at the new deal.
http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/11624442/nfl-extends-sunday-ticket-deal-directv
That is an increase of $.5b AAV. The CBA means that about half of that goes towards players salaries or another $250m to the total applied to compensation. Now I get that a piece of that goes to retirees, benefits, and the like but there is going to be upwards of $200m or $6.25m additional cash to each team. IOW, between the new deal, growth in existing markets, and the lack of artificial controls we could see the cap go up by $20m or more next season. What to take away from this is that even with conservative estimates of a continuation of last years outcome we are going to be under the cap. If the TV deal gets counted immediately and the league expands more than it did in the previous years' moribund economies then we could be well under the cap to the tune of $15m or more.
That is where we are at. Now let's look at what we can do to improve that moreso.
First let's look at obvious restructures. A maxim of mine is live in the world as it is and not the way you want it to be. While you may think that your personal finance approach to NFL accounting is the way to go, the team has repeatedly demonstrated that it is a strategy they will use. this year there are only a few candidates as opposed to previous years and I do not see them resturucturing everything under the sun like they did in 2012 to try and compensate for John Mara screwing us over. That leaves the top two salaries of Romo and Smith for restructuring. In both cases there are 5 or more years remaining on their deal resulting in a 4/5 reduction in their salary. if they had 4 years it would be a 3/4 reduction, 3 for 2/3 etc. x-1/x
Romo's deal is already 40% guaranteed but restructuring the whole thing save $13.6m on this years cap. If you only restructure the guaranteed portion you are looking at $6m in savings. Smith's deal is going to be a regular restructure and his reduction would net $8.8m in savings. Total of that is a range of $14.8-$22.4m.
Looking at the salaries from above there are 3 names whose salaries are not remotely equal to their production: Carr Free and Melton. Free and Melton are easy as the majority of their savings would be seen immediately as they are on the last year of their deals as their options have not been picked up. Cutting Free saves $7m and cutting Melton saves $8.5m. That is $15.5m for the two. Carr provides only a savings of $.6m if his cut and a more useful $6.5m if he is a June designation. That doesn't help until after FA is over but it does represent your draft class cap hit plus some.
I think it likely that Free renegotiates. He has shown the willingness to do that in the past and I see him doing that again. Cutting his salary in half or more would be huge. Carr and Melton I am not so sure about and I could see that going either way.
Here is the list of UFA:
Bryant
Murray
McClain
Carter
Harris
Durant
Selvie
Moore
Spencer
There are others but I don't see Parnell and co as being a priority relative to the above bunch. Prima facia it looks daunting to say the least but let's look at a conservative estimate in cap expansion and a moderate restructuring and cut approach.
So lets say that the cap expands similar to last year and goes up $10.4m or 8%. That gives us a starting point of $5.4m UNDER the cap. From there we restructure Romo and Smith's
guaranteed money resulting in another $14.8m. We are now $20.m under the cap. From there we cut Free's salary in half saving $4m, cut Melton saving $8.5m, and designate Carr June 1 giving us an additional $6.5m come the new league year.
That puts us at $32.5m under the cap for FA and $39.5m under come the new league year.
Now mind you that this is modest. It is entirely possible that there is a massive expansion in the cap as has been suggested with the release of the controls and there are more things we can do. We can restructure rookie deals, cut Bernadeau, and a series of other things to generate more cap room in addition to this.
In short, next time people suggest having to make painful cuts or talk of 'cap hell' point them here and have them try and reconcile what they are claiming with what I have presented here. This is a very young team with a lot of talent on rookie deals. This is not a roster loaded down with bloated contracts held hostage by dead money. It's a popular narrative as fearmongering sells but does not match known facts.
Please review this and see if i made any errors. I am not infallible and as always encourage discussion even if it does not agree with me.
