The Washington Post:
His release, long anticipated, does not save Washington any immediate salary cap space, with the free agency and trade period beginning at 12:01 a.m. Friday, but will create additional room this June. Lloyd, who could not be reached to comment, was designated a June 1 cut for salary cap purposes, executive vice president Vinny Cerrato said, which means his salary cap figure of $4.2 million will drop to $1.8 million on June 1. (Lloyd will count $5.5 million in dead cap space in 2009.)
I tend to agree with
Ben that heaping big blame needs to be placed on Lloyd for his own inability to do anything right, though I'm still pissed at the team's inability to sniff out a problem child before dishing him millions and trading away some draft picks. I understand money is tight this year, but I'd just as soon cut ties immediately rather than spread out the moneys we'll be penalized for Lloyd over the next two years.
Generally it always makes sense to pay tomorrow what you owe today in the NFL due to the ever increasing size of the salary cap (more on that in a moment). The cap will be larger in '09 than it is in '08 and thus 5.5M will be worth relatively less. Still,
why should ownership want to remind us of their errors again this time next year, when we're all talking about getting under the cap because we've got dead moneys counting against us?
It's a reminder how costly the Redskins' decision to trade third- and fourth-round draft picks for him and give him a new contract with a $10 million signing bonus was. Lloyd has talent, but that talent doesn't translate into on-field results to anywhere near the extent necessary to justify such a huge contract. Redskins owner Daniel Snyder is done paying Lloyd, but he isn't done paying the price for signing him.
And, as
Tandler points out citing to
PCs, without signing any draft picks or filling our 2008 roster, we're still already at over 120M dollars accounted for in the 2009 season.
Maybe all this worry is misplaced. As I said earlier, the cap is constantly increasing and, by 2011, perhaps it will just increase itself into infinity. Per the Dallas Morning News:
Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones believes there is a good chance ownership will opt out of the current labor agreement with the NFL Players Association by the November deadline...
NFLPA president Gene Upshaw has said once there is an uncapped year, a salary cap would never return.
Even though I know the Redskins would be one of the teams participating with an unfair advantage in the post salary cap era, I would still find this move very regrettable. The NFL as a whole has benefited enormously from the distinctions it has made between itself and the other major sports, and chief among those distinctions is our salary cap system.
But, if it is the case that the salary cap is going Brandon Lloyd, then maybe Dan Snyder will end up looking like a genius. All this postponement of salary cap payments through the use of restructures would be totally vindicated the day the cap disappears, since the Redskins have the payroll and financial security necessary to swallow any monetary hit so long as they aren't forced to restrict payments under a league mandated cap. There are few, if any, teams in the NFL operating with as unlimited as budget as Your Washington Redskins. Maybe that's been the plan all along?
