Barnwell on Cowboy's cap hell

[the Talking Can]

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...-jones-cowboys

Dallas thought it had a solution to its dead money problems, but that ended up causing it more grief. The uncapped year at the end of the old CBA in 2010 theoretically gave a team like Dallas a chance to soak up all the dead money it could while creating an opportunity to load up the base salaries for new players in the meantime. That's exactly what the Cowboys did; not only did they have some or all of the onerous deals for the likes of Hamlin and Owens expire during the uncapped year, they structured Austin's extension to give him a $17 million base salary in 2010 that essentially served as a signing bonus; because it was a base salary, though, the Cowboys were able to absorb the entire cap hit in 2010 as opposed to over the full length of the deal. The NFL frowned upon the move, fining the Cowboys millions of dollars in cap space for the 2012 and 2013 seasons.

Instead, the Cowboys have to create cap space by perpetually restructuring contracts and turning large base salaries into signing bonuses that they can then spread over the length of the deal. Take Witten, who has four years left on his deal and a base salary of $5 million next year with $3.4 million in bonuses, for a cap hit of $8.4 million. The Cowboys need Witten, but they also need to field a team and create cap space. What they usually do is renegotiate the contract by turning most of that base salary — let's say $4 million — into a guaranteed signing bonus. Witten gets his money up front, but the Cowboys get to spread that $4 million over the four remaining years of the deal at $1 million per year. Now, the Cowboys' theoretical cap for 2014 has Witten with a base salary of $1 million and assorted bonuses totaling $4.4 million; that's a total of just $5.4 million, meaning the Cowboys now have $3 million more to throw around. It's a painless transaction … until Witten (or one of the guys from that table) is no longer playable. That's when all the bonuses you've been throwing into the back of the deal for years come due, and you're paying millions in dead money.

That brings us to 2014 and the season of reckoning that appears to be coming for the Cowboys. Schefter's report notes that the Cowboys are going to be $31 million over the cap. Want to know how that'll happen? Here are the seven largest contracts on Dallas's roster (per Spotrac.com) and how their cap hold changes from 2013 to 2014:

Player 2013 to 2014

Tony Romo $11.8 million to $21.7 million
DeMarcus Ware $8.1 million to $16.0 million
Miles Austin $3.6 million to $8.2 million
Jason Witten $4.4 million to $8.4 million
Brandon Carr $5.4 million to $12.2 million
Sean Lee $2.9 million to $7.5 million
Orlando Scandrick $2.8 million to $5.6 million

Total $39.0 million to $79.6 million

Yikes. Oh, and one more thing: Two pretty important players for the Cowboys are in the final year of their contracts in 2014. Wide receiver Dez Bryant and left tackle Tyron Smith are two players the team will have to re-sign, and even if they sign deals in 2014 that don't begin until 2015, there's not exactly a lot of wiggle room to work with. This is a brutal situation.

It is, however, fixable in the short term. Jason Fitzgerald's Over the Cap site does a good job of getting into the gory details of each move and how it will specifically affect the Cowboys' cap figure, and he has a good plan to use as a starting point. I'm going to sneak in a couple of my own moves, too.

1. Restructure the contracts of Romo, Lee, Brandon Carr, and Witten. The new deals signed by Romo and Lee this past year each have two bonus-free seasons at the end of the contract that are designed to absorb renegotiations, while Fitzgerald suggests that Carr's deal might be renegotiated to add a season that would be voidable by the team. In all, those four moves would save Dallas about $22 million in cap room for the 2014 season. It doesn't help at all in figuring out how the Cowboys will fit the Bryant and Smith deals under their cap in 2015, but the goal here isn't to build a long-term viable strategy, it's to balance the budget today.

2. Release Doug Free. Releasing Free would create a hole in the starting lineup, but it would save the team $3.5 million with no future repercussions.

3. Release Austin after June 1. The Austin deal was supposed to give the Cowboys some cap relief in future seasons, but because they've renegotiated it several times, there's now a significant cap hit no matter what they do with Austin. His cap hit for 2014 is $8.3 million if he remains on the roster, but if the Cowboys release him, they'll owe $7.9 million in dead money. To make things easier, they'll have to designate Austin as a post–June 1 release, which allows them to spread the hit from the release over two seasons. Fitzgerald suggests this will free up $5.5 million...