Bleeding Green Nation
With a cap floor set for 2021, what awaits the Philadelphia Eagles’ salary cap?
Imagine something bad. This is like that.
The Eagles are going to have to completely gut their wide receiver room. All of Alshon Jeffery ($13M in cap space saved, post-June 1st designation), DeSean Jackson ($5.1M in cap space saved), and Marquise Goodwin are likely to be cut. Goodwin’s contract is rather unclear, as both Spotrac and Over the Cap have him on his San Francisco deal, while Mike Kaye of NJ.com reported that he had restructured his contract to a 1-year, $1.35M deal with an extra $1M available in incentives. It’s a bit of a moot point, as whatever money OTC and Spotrac have him taking up in 2020’s cap will rollover into 2021 if his deal was really restructured; and if it wasn’t, then he’s getting cut for sure, as all of that money is not guaranteed. Essentially, Goodwin is unlikely to make the 2020 roster (extremely unlikely if he hasn’t restructured his deal), and will represent around $7M in cap space saved.
With restructures, the Eagles will do what they’ve always done — get over the hump. Only this year, it will be a harder challenge than ever before — and in the next years, the cap will not rise as it had in the past, ensuring the Eagles still had room to add free agents or extend rookies despite their aggressive spending. As such, the main consequence of the current salary cap concessions isn’t so much about the current Eagles, but the future Eagles. The roster will remain crystalline for a few years, as the dead money the Eagles shoved into 2022 and 2023 and 2024 and 2025 to clear the 2021 limbo bar will drastically limit their ability to change their roster. To survive, they will go all-in on the big contracts they have now, clear out the middle-level deals, and pray that the rookies contribute quickly enough that the team remains competitive.
Blogging the Boys
The Dallas Cowboys might be in a tight salary cap situation come 2021
With the new cap deals, Cowboys management might have to get creative.
If the salary cap were, in fact, to be $175M next year then the Cowboys would have very little room for error. OverTheCap.com took a look at how things currently stand projecting into next year and a hypothetical cap of $175M and the Cowboys have just about $2.8M in salary cap space.
There are actually eight teams that project to be over the cap (the Philadelphia Eagles are by far the most far gone) so it’s not like the Cowboys are the ones stuck in a kobayashi maru, but still, this is a train coming at the team down the tracks less than a year from now and they have to be prepared.
Unfortunately the Cowboys were unable to get a long-term deal done with Dak Prescott and if they have to place the franchise tag on him again next season (a high possibility) then his cap charge will be $37.7M. That is 21%. Yikes.
This is just one of a few complications facing the Cowboys, but there are obviously a lot of players that are going to be massively impacted as well.
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A bubble without a bubble
Pro Football Talk reported Sunday that part of the deal is that there will be strict limits on player activities off the field. Per PFT:
Players cannot attend indoor night clubs, indoor bars (except to pickup food), indoor house parties (with 15 or more people), indoor concerts, professional sporting events, or indoor church services that allow attendance above 25 percent of capacity.
Players can be fined for violating these rules. Moreover, if they test positive after engaging in prohibited activities, they will not be paid for the games they miss. Also, future guarantees in their contracts would be voided.
Players will be going home to their apartments or houses, to their families or whoever they live with. This won’t be easy for many of these guys, used to having freedom to move around and enjoy whatever spare time they do have. I have zero problem with it, though. It’s all part of the whole thing we keep talking about with the pandemic still raging across the country — your decisions aren’t just your decisions. They have potentially serious health ramifications for other people.
Like it or not, there are just some things we can’t do right now. Professional athletes included.