Dead caps the past 10 years - here's the manifesto (1 Viewer)

[texasjefe]

When each year Mickey "gets under the salary cap," he does it by shoving a season's over-the-cap remaining roster debt to be paid in future seasons, via player contract extensions, releases, and restructures. This process occurs in the winter off-season and the Saints must be under the league salary cap amount on the top 51 contracts by the mid-March first day of a new league year. Once dead money is created in a future year, it cannot be altered. The number itself can be lowered incrementally with post June 1 designations, but the timing of that is a whole 'nother set of financial gymnastics.

Let me use plain language: when Mickey shoves today's money onto tomorrow's dead cap, the money is dead. It is no longer spendable on players in the future season it was placed. Every year, Mickey builds a roster on average 75-87% of the money that could be available.

We lauded Mickey's debt strategy in Drew's years when the Saints restocked for each season's run. Now, it's a quicksand pit.

Here's the number and percentage of dead cap dollars each of the last 10 seasons.

2015
Salary cap $143.3M
Saints Dead money $21.6M
Percentage of salary unavailable in 2015 due to dead cap: 15%

2016
Salary cap $155.27M

Saints Dead money $42.1M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2016 due to dead cap: 27%

2017
Salary cap $167M
Saints Dead money $25.6M
Percentage of unavailable salary and amount in 2017 due to dead cap: 27%

2018
Salary cap $177.2M
Saints Dead money $22.7M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2018 due to dead cap: 12.8%

2019
Salary cap $188.2M
Saints Dead money and percentage of salary $25.6M 13.6%

2020
Salary cap $198.2M
Saints Dead money $22.5M 11.7%

2021
Salary cap $182.5M (Covid year)
Saints Dead money $49.7M 27.2%

2022
Salary cap $208.2M
Saints Dead money $48M 23%

2023
Salary cap $224.8M
Saints Dead money $35M 15.5%

2024
Salary cap $255.4M
Saints Dead money $41.4M 16.2%

2025
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money at this moment, with hits still coming from Carr whether he stays or goes and the injured guys late in their careers $48M (incomplete)

2026... 2027...
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money TBD but you see the trend

Commentary:

It was tolerable and fun! when we had Drew and were using the money to pay for guys still producing. But as the overthecap staff have documented, what changed is that the dead cap restructures now are wholly from players off or leaving the roster, whereas 10 years ago they helped support extensions of talent still producing. What also changed is that the normal "cap savings" options, i.e. the plus difference between cap salary not paid for with a terminated player over their dead cap amount changed also, from the black into the red. These contracts Mickey has turned himself into a pretzel over are now more cost effective by keeping vets on the team, than releasing them.

Pair this with Mickey's penchant for drafting less players per capita each season than his peers, and, the 2nd contract eligible guys we developed and lost, and I will continue to say that the depth problems (with injuries) are a symptom of cap mismanagement.

Yes, the NFL raises the cap substantially each year, and yes, other teams have high dead caps from time to time. But, I defy anyone who can find a team where dead caps are an annual feature - robbing the Saints of effective salary cap space EVERY YEAR - rather than as a temporary 1-2 year outlier. The Saints are now chronic with players getting career-threatening injuries when they are already dead-capped, or as we really know, late-career injured players when they are dead capped.

Yes, the cap rises alot each year, but Mickey is annually taking that new cash asset and financing massive debt, whereas other teams are using the cap rises to balance their cap or pay players more in a rapidly rising market!

Yes, Covid season killed the Saints both on the dead cap and salary cap sides of the ledger, but 1 horrendous financial year - in any sound business - should be correctable over the next 5 years! And the other teams were buffered for that "100 year flood or fire" year because they were not massively in dead cap debt.

Name another GM who gets away with 4 non-playoff seasons in a row, cap financing that is now never less than 3 years to an extreme solution, and who failed at improving the team with their last major FA QB and head coach hires. (Net 0 in getting 7.5 wins on average the past 4 years.).

With the annual salary caps' value now fully and structurally deprived by Mickey, and with Mickey having the same kind of "family" job security a Jerry Jones has, the simple bet continues that Mickey Loomis will hire a new coach who is a substantial net positive in wins for this team. And it has to be a substantial increase in wins - in other words, the improving quality of play must be evident. The talent eval meter is currently on RED ALERT. Young talent must enter the franchise and it must develop. No more, oh look Derek just won 4 out of 5 to end the season so we'll be good next year. Or, oh look, Derek's is highly ranked among NFC QB's! And, Oh look, we're a 12-5 team if not for the injuries!

No, we're a team stuck in buying a season's football team with at best 80% of the money available in a rapidly rising player market, and with net 0 wins on the collective salary, coaching, and talent for 4 years.

If I were a trustee, I'd give Loomis a $10 million thank you gift, and clean house in the front office. Have him design a golf course. Go manage the family portfolio. Stay away from football decisions.

 

[oysters]

Thank you for the time you spent putting this together. I just don’t see why fans get so worked up about this. Yes we restructured a ton when Brees was here because we were close to winning it all. Then Covid hit and it put a HUGE wrench in any plans to get out of cap hell and basically forced a ton of restructuring.

And now it takes time to get out of it. We started last year and will continue for another year or two. Carr’s contract makes it tough but, again, he was signed because we thought we could win the South and probably would have if injuries hadn’t ruined seasons.

Would yall have preferred we just not tried to win when Brees was here? Not me. And now it’s time to reset and the team is doing that. You can argue about it being a couple of years too late but that’s hindsight

 

[Booker]

Excellent work. What you see from 2015-2017 is the result of getting rid of Galette and Graham, both one year after signing them to extensions, and then later Byrd, and then 2021-2022 was the team having to jiggle Brees retiring with the cap going down because of the COVID year.

But from 2023 forward, where the cap should have been getting in better shape, you see the dead money trending back up, with no justifiable reason or any postseason appearances to show for it.

 

[SonOfNOLA]

The missing context is that the dead money stems from pushing back cap hits of a HOF QB and a large number of Pro Bowl/All-Pro players (originally drafted by the Saints) to maintain a competitive team. Dead money totals appears to be high when restructuring a multitude of productive veterans on the team, in different age and guaranteed money ranges.

Dead money and the initial over the cap total isn’t stopping the Saints and NFL teams from adding talent.

Bad coaching, inconsistent QB play/lack of QB draft priority post-Brees, and a few missed 1st round DE picks looks to be the primary sources of the Saints’ losing seasons.

Saints have used most of their salary cap on extending productive-star draft picks. Outside of Drew and Demario, the team’s core talent during playoff runs and winning seasons were never originally-acquired with salary cap space. Available or unavailable cap space isn’t solving the Saints’ worst problems at HC, QB and core talent.

 

[cdogg]

Of the top 9 teams with the most dead cap money in the league, 6 made the playoffs. So not exactly a team killer.

 

[St. Widge]

Excellent work. What you see from 2015-2017 is the result of getting rid of Galette and Graham, both one year after signing them to extensions, and then later Byrd, and then 2021-2022 was the team having to jiggle Brees retiring with the cap going down because of the COVID year.

But from 2023 forward, where the cap should have been getting in better shape, you see the dead money trending back up, with no justifiable reason or any postseason appearances to show for it.

I totally agree that getting the cap in order should have started 2 if not 3 years ago, But it did start last year so we are on our way there and should be fine in two years. Frankly, my bigger concern with Loomis is can he get this HC hire right and can we start to draft better.

 

[Elvis]

Great post. Just want to add that if nothing changes, no extensions etc; for 2025 the number will grow from $48 million to somewhere around $65 million once the league year hits unless Juwan, Chase Young and Tanoh are resigned as they all have expiring contracts with void years. If Carr is cut that would add another $50 million totaling $115 million in dead $ for 2025.

In 2026 we'll have an additional 12 contracts expire with void years for around $63 million in dead money.

Obviously, some of that is going to have to be moved around and some of those players will need to be extended to avoid that scenario. But there are a LOT of void years coming and a lot of dead cap coming with it.

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

The missing context is that the dead money stems from pushing back cap hits of a HOF QB and a large number of Pro Bowl/All-Pro players (originally drafted by the Saints) to maintain a competitive team. Dead money totals appears to be high when restructuring a multitude of productive veterans on the team, in different age and guaranteed money ranges.

Dead money and the initial over the cap total isn’t stopping the Saints and NFL teams from adding talent.

Bad coaching, inconsistent QB play/lack of QB draft priority post-Brees, and a few missed 1st round DE picks looks to be the primary sources of the Saints’ losing seasons.

Saints have used most of their salary cap on extending productive-star draft picks. Outside of Drew and Demario, the team’s core talent during playoff runs and winning seasons were never originally-acquired with salary cap space. Available or unavailable cap space isn’t solving the Saints’ worst problems at HC, QB and core talent.

The bolded part is routinely ignored around here when it comes to the mob attacking Loomis. IMO, any complaints about his CAP management skills should fall on deaf ears because there were very few complaints when those largest contracts were handed out.

In particular, Brees played out the entirety of his 2012 5yr contract and thwarted attempts of negotiating long term extension in 2016. His contract had a ballooning final 2 years on the CAP and a multi-year extension could have mitigated our current situation. Instead of working out a long term deal, Brees opted to do a 1yr deal which accounted for well over 10% of the cap and essentially repeated doing so until his retirement 5 years later.

Loomis had no other alternative but to continue with his "kick the can" approach if he wanted to continue to fill a competitive roster.

I'll hold him accountable for not firing DA after yr 2 and for giving in to the idea that we should chase a FA QB. He had a chance to pay the bill for the Payton/Brees era and he opted to double down on his error of hiring DA cause Payton endorsed the hire.

 

[guidomerkinsrules]

Thank you for the time you spent putting this together. I just don’t see why fans get so worked up about this. Yes we restructured a ton when Brees was here because we were close to winning it all. Then Covid hit and it put a HUGE wrench in any plans to get out of cap hell and basically forced a ton of restructuring.

And now it takes time to get out of it. We started last year and will continue for another year or two. Carr’s contract makes it tough but, again, he was signed because we thought we could win the South and probably would have if injuries hadn’t ruined seasons.

Would yall have preferred we just not tried to win when Brees was here? Not me. And now it’s time to reset and the team is doing that. You can argue about it being a couple of years too late but that’s hindsight

This
There is nothing about the NFL that should indicate to any fan that a team’s action is predictive
If fans could reason the likely success of GM and coach and players; Vegas would avoid the nfl like the plague
But Vegas makes its mint off of men who think they can figure out chaos
They can’t but it doesn’t stop them from trying

 

[oodank]

The dead cap % has improved the past 2 seasons when compared to the prior 2 seasons. 22 and 21 vs 15 and 16.....so it is getting better over time, gradually. EVERY team carries dead cap in varying amounts.

 

[No2DC]

When each year Mickey "gets under the salary cap," he does it by shoving a season's over-the-cap remaining roster debt to be paid in future seasons, via player contract extensions, releases, and restructures. This process occurs in the winter off-season and the Saints must be under the league salary cap amount on the top 51 contracts by the mid-March first day of a new league year. Once dead money is created in a future year, it cannot be altered. The number itself can be lowered incrementally with post June 1 designations, but the timing of that is a whole 'nother set of financial gymnastics.

Let me use plain language: when Mickey shoves today's money onto tomorrow's dead cap, the money is dead. It is no longer spendable on players in the future season it was placed. Every year, Mickey builds a roster on average 75-87% of the money that could be available.

We lauded Mickey's debt strategy in Drew's years when the Saints restocked for each season's run. Now, it's a quicksand pit.

Here's the number and percentage of dead cap dollars each of the last 10 seasons.

2015
Salary cap $143.3M
Saints Dead money $21.6M
Percentage of salary unavailable in 2015 due to dead cap: 15%

2016
Salary cap $155.27M

Saints Dead money $42.1M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2016 due to dead cap: 27%

2017
Salary cap $167M
Saints Dead money $25.6M
Percentage of unavailable salary and amount in 2017 due to dead cap: 27%

2018
Salary cap $177.2M
Saints Dead money $22.7M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2018 due to dead cap: 12.8%

2019
Salary cap $188.2M
Saints Dead money and percentage of salary $25.6M 13.6%

2020
Salary cap $198.2M
Saints Dead money $22.5M 11.7%

2021
Salary cap $182.5M (Covid year)
Saints Dead money $49.7M 27.2%

2022
Salary cap $208.2M
Saints Dead money $48M 23%

2023
Salary cap $224.8M
Saints Dead money $35M 15.5%

2024
Salary cap $255.4M
Saints Dead money $41.4M 16.2%

2025
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money at this moment, with hits still coming from Carr whether he stays or goes and the injured guys late in their careers $48M (incomplete)

2026... 2027...
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money TBD but you see the trend

Commentary:

It was tolerable and fun! when we had Drew and were using the money to pay for guys still producing. But as the overthecap staff have documented, what changed is that the dead cap restructures now are wholly from players off or leaving the roster, whereas 10 years ago they helped support extensions of talent still producing. What also changed is that the normal "cap savings" options, i.e. the plus difference between cap salary not paid for with a terminated player over their dead cap amount changed also, from the black into the red. These contracts Mickey has turned himself into a pretzel over are now more cost effective by keeping vets on the team, than releasing them.

Pair this with Mickey's penchant for drafting less players per capita each season than his peers, and, the 2nd contract eligible guys we developed and lost, and I will continue to say that the depth problems (with injuries) are a symptom of cap mismanagement.

Yes, the NFL raises the cap substantially each year, and yes, other teams have high dead caps from time to time. But, I defy anyone who can find a team where dead caps are an annual feature - robbing the Saints of effective salary cap space EVERY YEAR - rather than as a temporary 1-2 year outlier. The Saints are now chronic with players getting career-threatening injuries when they are already dead-capped, or as we really know, late-career injured players when they are dead capped.

Yes, the cap rises alot each year, but Mickey is annually taking that new cash asset and financing massive debt, whereas other teams are using the cap rises to balance their cap or pay players more in a rapidly rising market!

Yes, Covid season killed the Saints both on the dead cap and salary cap sides of the ledger, but 1 horrendous financial year - in any sound business - should be correctable over the next 5 years! And the other teams were buffered for that "100 year flood or fire" year because they were not massively in dead cap debt.

Name another GM who gets away with 4 non-playoff seasons in a row, cap financing that is now never less than 3 years to an extreme solution, and who failed at improving the team with their last major FA QB and head coach hires. (Net 0 in getting 7.5 wins on average the past 4 years.).

With the annual salary caps' value now fully and structurally deprived by Mickey, and with Mickey having the same kind of "family" job security a Jerry Jones has, the simple bet continues that Mickey Loomis will hire a new coach who is a substantial net positive in wins for this team. And it has to be a substantial increase in wins - in other words, the improving quality of play must be evident. The talent eval meter is currently on RED ALERT. Young talent must enter the franchise and it must develop. No more, oh look Derek just won 4 out of 5 to end the season so we'll be good next year. Or, oh look, Derek's is highly ranked among NFC QB's! And, Oh look, we're a 12-5 team if not for the injuries!

No, we're a team stuck in buying a season's football team with at best 80% of the money available in a rapidly rising player market, and with net 0 wins on the collective salary, coaching, and talent for 4 years.

If I were a trustee, I'd give Loomis a $10 million thank you gift, and clean house in the front office. Have him design a golf course. Go manage the family portfolio. Stay away from football decisions.

And this is the guy picking the next coach and guiding us into the future. Prepare to be extremely disappointed.

 

[No2DC]

The bolded part is routinely ignored around here when it comes to the mob attacking Loomis. IMO, any complaints about his CAP management skills should fall on deaf ears because there were very few complaints when those largest contracts were handed out.

In particular, Brees played out the entirety of his 2012 5yr contract and thwarted attempts of negotiating long term extension in 2016. His contract had a ballooning final 2 years on the CAP and a multi-year extension could have mitigated our current situation. Instead of working out a long term deal, Brees opted to do a 1yr deal which accounted for well over 10% of the cap and essentially repeated doing so until his retirement 5 years later.

Loomis had no other alternative but to continue with his "kick the can" approach if he wanted to continue to fill a competitive roster.

I'll hold him accountable for not firing DA after yr 2 and for giving in to the idea that we should chase a FA QB. He had a chance to pay the bill for the Payton/Brees era and he opted to double down on his error of hiring DA cause Payton endorsed the hire.

I don't think most people blame Mick for what happened money-wise while Drew was here. It's the DA pivot that was illogical management.

 

[Booker]

I don't think most people blame Mick for what happened money-wise while Drew was here. It's the DA pivot that was illogical management.

It was like he was trying to cover for the poor hire by throwing more future cap space at the team. And as Elvis pointed out out, there’s a lot of dead money from the DA era still set to hit the next couple of years.

 

[ELLIASJWILLIAMS]

Thank you for the time you spent putting this together. I just don’t see why fans get so worked up about this. Yes we restructured a ton when Brees was here because we were close to winning it all. Then Covid hit and it put a HUGE wrench in any plans to get out of cap hell and basically forced a ton of restructuring.

And now it takes time to get out of it. We started last year and will continue for another year or two. Carr’s contract makes it tough but, again, he was signed because we thought we could win the South and probably would have if injuries hadn’t ruined seasons.

Would yall have preferred we just not tried to win when Brees was here? Not me. And now it’s time to reset and the team is doing that. You can argue about it being a couple of years too late but that’s hindsight

Precisely this . It’s like people refuse to acknowledge we won a lot of games this way. Now we can’t, it’s time to pivot, and they have. It’s just going to take time to see it.

 

[ASaintFerLife]

When each year Mickey "gets under the salary cap," he does it by shoving a season's over-the-cap remaining roster debt to be paid in future seasons, via player contract extensions, releases, and restructures. This process occurs in the winter off-season and the Saints must be under the league salary cap amount on the top 51 contracts by the mid-March first day of a new league year. Once dead money is created in a future year, it cannot be altered. The number itself can be lowered incrementally with post June 1 designations, but the timing of that is a whole 'nother set of financial gymnastics.

Let me use plain language: when Mickey shoves today's money onto tomorrow's dead cap, the money is dead. It is no longer spendable on players in the future season it was placed. Every year, Mickey builds a roster on average 75-87% of the money that could be available.

We lauded Mickey's debt strategy in Drew's years when the Saints restocked for each season's run. Now, it's a quicksand pit.

Here's the number and percentage of dead cap dollars each of the last 10 seasons.

2015
Salary cap $143.3M
Saints Dead money $21.6M
Percentage of salary unavailable in 2015 due to dead cap: 15%

2016
Salary cap $155.27M

Saints Dead money $42.1M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2016 due to dead cap: 27%

2017
Salary cap $167M
Saints Dead money $25.6M
Percentage of unavailable salary and amount in 2017 due to dead cap: 27%

2018
Salary cap $177.2M
Saints Dead money $22.7M
Percentage of unavailable salary in 2018 due to dead cap: 12.8%

2019
Salary cap $188.2M
Saints Dead money and percentage of salary $25.6M 13.6%

2020
Salary cap $198.2M
Saints Dead money $22.5M 11.7%

2021
Salary cap $182.5M (Covid year)
Saints Dead money $49.7M 27.2%

2022
Salary cap $208.2M
Saints Dead money $48M 23%

2023
Salary cap $224.8M
Saints Dead money $35M 15.5%

2024
Salary cap $255.4M
Saints Dead money $41.4M 16.2%

2025
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money at this moment, with hits still coming from Carr whether he stays or goes and the injured guys late in their careers $48M (incomplete)

2026... 2027...
Salary cap TBD
Saints dead money TBD but you see the trend

Commentary:

It was tolerable and fun! when we had Drew and were using the money to pay for guys still producing. But as the overthecap staff have documented, what changed is that the dead cap restructures now are wholly from players off or leaving the roster, whereas 10 years ago they helped support extensions of talent still producing. What also changed is that the normal "cap savings" options, i.e. the plus difference between cap salary not paid for with a terminated player over their dead cap amount changed also, from the black into the red. These contracts Mickey has turned himself into a pretzel over are now more cost effective by keeping vets on the team, than releasing them.

Pair this with Mickey's penchant for drafting less players per capita each season than his peers, and, the 2nd contract eligible guys we developed and lost, and I will continue to say that the depth problems (with injuries) are a symptom of cap mismanagement.

Yes, the NFL raises the cap substantially each year, and yes, other teams have high dead caps from time to time. But, I defy anyone who can find a team where dead caps are an annual feature - robbing the Saints of effective salary cap space EVERY YEAR - rather than as a temporary 1-2 year outlier. The Saints are now chronic with players getting career-threatening injuries when they are already dead-capped, or as we really know, late-career injured players when they are dead capped.

Yes, the cap rises alot each year, but Mickey is annually taking that new cash asset and financing massive debt, whereas other teams are using the cap rises to balance their cap or pay players more in a rapidly rising market!

Yes, Covid season killed the Saints both on the dead cap and salary cap sides of the ledger, but 1 horrendous financial year - in any sound business - should be correctable over the next 5 years! And the other teams were buffered for that "100 year flood or fire" year because they were not massively in dead cap debt.

Name another GM who gets away with 4 non-playoff seasons in a row, cap financing that is now never less than 3 years to an extreme solution, and who failed at improving the team with their last major FA QB and head coach hires. (Net 0 in getting 7.5 wins on average the past 4 years.).

With the annual salary caps' value now fully and structurally deprived by Mickey, and with Mickey having the same kind of "family" job security a Jerry Jones has, the simple bet continues that Mickey Loomis will hire a new coach who is a substantial net positive in wins for this team. And it has to be a substantial increase in wins - in other words, the improving quality of play must be evident. The talent eval meter is currently on RED ALERT. Young talent must enter the franchise and it must develop. No more, oh look Derek just won 4 out of 5 to end the season so we'll be good next year. Or, oh look, Derek's is highly ranked among NFC QB's! And, Oh look, we're a 12-5 team if not for the injuries!

No, we're a team stuck in buying a season's football team with at best 80% of the money available in a rapidly rising player market, and with net 0 wins on the collective salary, coaching, and talent for 4 years.

If I were a trustee, I'd give Loomis a $10 million thank you gift, and clean house in the front office. Have him design a golf course. Go manage the family portfolio. Stay away from football decisions.

this looks and sounds like the federal government handing contracts out. $15,000.00 to replace a toilet and such.