{2023 Thread Bumped} Underhill Giving No Quarter to Nick Wright

new city champ said
So the question is how much does the Saints future debt constrain their present ability to spend, if at all? Are they at a functional disadvantage because they are effectively operating with a lower payroll this season than teams that don’t carry so much debt on their books or is the system truly so flexible that it let’s them defer and defer salary to the future with no negative impact on current ability to spend? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle?

All teams borrow from the future, you would be at a competitive disadvantage if you didn’t at least do it with signing bonuses because you would have trouble fitting first year contract cash on your books. Players generally don’t care about the cap as much as they worry about how much cash comes in the early years of a contract because they know they have short careers and a team can cut them before they collect the full contract.

The difference between the Saints and other teams, at least recently, is that we borrow in amounts that put our cap way over any reasonable projection of the following year’s cap. As a result, we have to issue new bonuses on old contracts to get under the cap because the old contracts have too much dead money for cuts to be helpful. And the restructures only add to the dead money. We will be in the same boat next year, we are projected at $300m+ in cap obligations before some of the final cuts and restructures get posted. No way the cap is going up $80m+ in one year.

All teams can use restructuring bonuses to clear space. Again, the difference with the Saints is that we are paying restructuring bonuses to get under the cap versus paying restructuring bonuses to make room for signing new players. Put more simply, most of our restructuring bonuses are wasted, and there is only so much restructuring capacity that each team has.

Because that capacity is limited, and the cap itself has a limit, yes we are more constrained. Other teams might not use up all their capacity, but they have it if they want/need it.