N/S Cowboys agree to terms with LB Justin Durant without having cap space (1 Viewer)

[Changeling]

But what can teams do nowadays? No big market team can say ok we're going to take a year off and suck because of the cap. Make sure y'all still buy those season tickets! We'll be competitive again in 3-4 years, promise! FINE PRINT as long as we hit on every draft pick those years and collect 7-8 pro bowlers willing to play for league minimum.
Parity in the Nfl sucks.

 

[Merl]

Yes. Brees' salary jump doesn't occur until 2015 and even if we franchised Graham we still wouldnt be as over the cap in 2014 (we'd be just barely over) as opposed to in the 2013.

If you want to speculate, a Graham resigning will actually put his 2014 number at less than the franchise amount, Drew Brees will likely restructure (though probably not until 2015), and we'll have many trimmable salaries in 2014 as well (all figures post-dead money, Roman Harper, $6 million in cap space; Jabari Greer, $4 million in cap space; Darren Sproles $3.4 million in cap space; Pierre Thomas, $2.5 million in cap space; Lance Moore $3.1 million in cap space).

Of course I'm not suggesting most, or any of those players will be cut. At least some will be extensions (Lance Moore and Darren Sproles being prime candidates), but that would likely lower their cap numbers as well, and players like Roman Harper and Jabari Greer could very well be cut.

Either way, point is, not only will we likely be slightly under the cap for 2014, but even if we franchised Graham, giving him the highest cap figure we would likely carry him at, we'd still be only slightly over and muchless so than we were this past season. And the players we can restructure/cut will carry less dead space and create less future cap problems than the player we did so this year.

This was our worst cap year.

Oh, and we still signed a top 3 FA CB, a top 3 FA TE, and will likely add at least one other veteran FA before the draft.


So yeah.

Loomis

You forgot the biggest one for the 2014 Season. Will Smith has a 13.9m cap hit next year and cutting him will save 11.55m. His reduction that was just done did not include anything about next year.