ESPN: Clayton - Skins positively affected by new cap

[Hitman#21]

I just want FA to begin already! Looks like July 15th is a realstic estimate, but with all this greed..who knows honestly.

[SouthCarolinaSkins]

Actually was talking about the mixing up of your/you're...

That is quickly becoming a pet peeve. I see it more often these days on message boards. I think some people are just becoming lazy and do not wanna type "you're," while others just do not know the difference between the two. I actually saw a guy driving down the road, promoting his personal business, about a week ago. The door sized magnet read something like (paraphrasing), "Your gonna be satisfied."

Carry on....

[TD_washingtonredskins]

I hope the Cowboys do all of this. It will put them in cap hell later. What saved the Skins from going into cap hell was the uncapped year. If the CBA is a 10 year agreement like I am hearing, what you are talking about will hurt the cowgirls in the future.

You can't really say that unless you concede that the Redskins were hurt by doing the same things for almost a decade.

[Destructis]

I do concede that. If it wasn't for the uncapped year, it would have killed us eventually.

[TD_washingtonredskins]

I do concede that. If it wasn't for the uncapped year, it would have killed us eventually.

Oh OK...I still think we were in some sort of "cap Hell" in that we didn't have the resources to acquire the type of depth we needed to be a truly good team while Gibbs was here. It wasn't true cap Hell where we had to release 18 players, but we were limited even with the "get out of jail free" card the uncapped year provided.

[Destructis]

We were robbing Peter to pay Paul. We would renegoiate contracts to sign that one big, aging, past their prime free agent.

[ABQCOWBOY]

I hope the Cowboys do all of this. It will put them in cap hell later. What saved the Skins from going into cap hell was the uncapped year. If the CBA is a 10 year agreement like I am hearing, what you are talking about will hurt the cowgirls in the future.

I don't think it will put them in cap hell. The cuts I mention will save money and we are out of them in a season. The restructured deals are with players that will likely play there careers out in Dallas or be very close to it. I don't see this happening but I guess anything is possible.

As far as dead cap money, I wouldn't be too sure about that. I don't think that the agreement is going to allow dead cap to just be tossed away in the uncapped year. I think that it might be applied in the new capped year once this is all said and done with. I guess we'll see.

[TD_washingtonredskins]

We were robbing Peter to pay Paul. We would renegoiate contracts to sign that one big, aging, past their prime free agent.

Right...that was the problem. We'd renegotiate the contracts of some players which locked us into longer contracts with them and made them uncuttable. We were stuck with a very large percentage of our roster and that money was allocated. That's why we didn't have the luxury of cutting players to clear space. We had 30-somethings with 3-5 years still on their renegotiated contracts.

[pjfootballer]

The Cowboy's situation is not nearly as bad as it is being made out to be IMO. Dallas has not restructured any contracts to this point. They have a lot of room under restructure. What I think you will see is a few contracts reworked and extended. Romo sits to pee is coming up on a contract so I expect the Cowboys will get that out of the way and simply ease the cap. Nobody really knows what the CBA is going to say so all of this is speculation but we can kinda get an idea I think. Romo sits to pee's cap number in 2011 is over 9 million. I expect they will rework his contract, sign for a longer period of time and push a lot of that money into a signing bonus in order to get him much closer to the vet minimum. Ware and Miles are due 6.7 and 8.54 Million this year respectively. There contracts will also be reworked and funds pushed into Bonus structure to get the cap number down. If you just do those three players, which is a reasonable assumption cause none of those guys are going anywhere any time soon, you can probably save 17.5 Million in cap space.

You figure that Brookings (2.5 Million), Colombo (2 Mil), Olshansky (4.5 Mil), Barber (4.25 Mil), Kris Brown (2.5 Mil) and there is a possability that Newman (8 Mil) could be gone.

We could also see a guy like Kitna get traded to a team like Miami, Minnesota or Cincy as well. He is scheduled to make (2.6 Mil) this season and while he is very valuable, he represents a very expensive luxury and has trade value. If McGee shows improvement, we could very easily see that kind of move happen.

All of these are very realistic cap moves that we could see happen. If the Cowboys wanted to create space, they could easily do it. Lots of guys that could be sent packing and none of them would be players that impact a lot, based on production.

Next year, if the Cowboys wanted to, they could get out from under Roy Williams and Bigg's contracts next year, which would create even more cap.

At this point, it's all a guessing game but I don't think we will see the Cowboys in to terrible a cap situation this year.

I see what you are saying, but when you restructure base salary into cap, it is spread out over future years, which is what always got us into trouble. That kind of manuvering is not good in the long run for the team's cap. We've lived it. It will catch up with you. We got a "get out of jail free" card with the uncapped year last year.

[ABQCOWBOY]

I see what you are saying, but when you restructure base salary into cap, it is spread out over future years, which is what always got us into trouble. That kind of manuvering is not good in the long run for the team's cap. We've lived it. It will catch up with you. We got a "get out of jail free" card with the uncapped year last year.

Yes, but that typically has a negative effect only when you do this with players that do not play out their contracts. In the case of the three players I mentioned earlier, Romo sits to pee, Ware and Austin, I suspect that all three will be with the team for some time. Romo sits to pee is a natural for this because, unlike Ware and Austin, he is coming up on a contract. Romo sits to pee will be a top priority for the team to resign. When that happens, and I think it will be this year, we are going to take that 9 million cap number, create a situation where we negotiate a deal that allows us to push a lot of that money into bonus (basically guarantee it) and reduce the cap hit. Because we will resign him for multiple years anyway, we will probably front load that contract and give ourselves cap relief with option years at the end of the contract in order to get out of it if Romo sits to pee is not performing in say year 11 or 12 or whatever. With Ware and Miles, it's a little different but I don't honestly see either of those guys going anywhere anytime soon. We will spread the bonus across multiple years and plan our cap that way. Now, if one or multiple of these guys were to fall off the map and stop performing, then we would indeed be in the situation the Skinz have found themselves in, in the past, so yeah there is a bit of a gamble there. However, if all three produce for the majority of their contracts, I think the Cowboys will be fine.

[Pedro]

Are we now in a a position where we may rework deals to bring money forward, rather than push it back?

Also at what point in the season would the % spend need to be hit? Re-signing the likes of Landry would be a good way to go IMO, along with new deals for cheap guys who perform well (like Armstrong now and any number of guys during the season who may show they belong long term).

I'd much rather be known as a team that pays players who over perform their contract with us than a team that overpays for other team's talent. This would fit in with the Mike Shanahan 'play well on teams, get a chance on O or D' that we saw last season, most notably for me (maybe due my ignorance/low expectations) with Byron Westbrook. He looked good as a NB when he got a chance at the end of the season iirc, dude was reading and reacting fast enough to be in on the tackle over a wide area about him. Maybe it was just me though.

[wwSEANd]

You figure that Brookings (2.5 Million), Colombo (2 Mil), Olshansky (4.5 Mil), Barber (4.25 Mil), Kris Brown (2.5 Mil) and there is a possability that Newman (8 Mil) could be gone.

We could also see a guy like Kitna get traded to a team like Miami, Minnesota or Cincy as well. He is scheduled to make (2.6 Mil) this season and while he is very valuable, he represents a very expensive luxury and has trade value. If McGee shows improvement, we could very easily see that kind of move happen.

...

Next year, if the Cowboys wanted to, they could get out from under Roy Williams and Bigg's contracts next year, which would create even more cap.

all of those moves make sense. the restructuring ones especially, and you're right about those guys being pretty safe bets to stick around, which makes them logical targets for restructuring. i do see one potential problem, though: dead cap space.

i don't know what brookings/colombo/olshansky/barber/brown/newman/williams/biggs contracts look like, but often cutting expensive players is MORE expensive (that year) than keeping them; you do it because it saves you money in future years. same situation with trading kitna. do all of those guys have contracts that save money *this* year by cutting them?

i really don't know, so maybe you could help out with the numbers. if that's not the case, and Dallas is already so far over the cap, then it could be a very sticky situation - one very much like the Skins were in before the cap magically disappeared and saved our butts.

Are we now in a a position where we may rework deals to bring money forward, rather than push it back?

Also at what point in the season would the % spend need to be hit? Re-signing the likes of Landry would be a good way to go IMO, along with new deals for cheap guys who perform well (like Armstrong now and any number of guys during the season who may show they belong long term).

I'd much rather be known as a team that pays players who over perform their contract with us than a team that overpays for other team's talent. This would fit in with the Mike Shanahan 'play well on teams, get a chance on O or D' that we saw last season, most notably for me (maybe due my ignorance/low expectations) with Byron Westbrook. He looked good as a NB when he got a chance at the end of the season iirc, dude was reading and reacting fast enough to be in on the tackle over a wide area about him. Maybe it was just me though.

that's actually... i hadn't thought about it exactly that way, but YES! get proactive on rewarding productivity! in the past, we could do that with playing time, but we were hamstrung by our cap situation and couldn't financially reward our overachievers. now we can show guys that the extra effort is worth it for MANY reasons. that can only be a good thing.