2023

- $4.4M in cap space currently

- $77.5M(!) in dead cap which is league-high from 52 ex-players which is also league-high

- Major expiring contracts after this season are: Mike Evans ($23.9M cap figure this season), Devin White ($11.7M), Antoine Winfield Jr. ($2.12M), Lavonte David ($1.83M), Baker Mayfield ($1.7M), Greg Gaines ($1.6M), William Gholston ($1.31M), Ryan Neal ($1.09M)

2024

- $47.97M in projected cap space

- $203,681 in dead cap from a handful of third string and cut players

- Major expiring contracts after 2024 are: Shaq Barrett ($10.8M), Carlton Davis ($7.5M), Tristan Wirfs ($3.7M), Kyle Trask ($1.5M)

The big headline here is the dead cap that rolls off. For those who don’t know, dead cap is money that you have already paid out but still counts against the cap. We got the majority of this from signing Brady and friends and the only way to fit them all in under the cap was to sign the higher dollar guys to ‘void’ years which take the signing bonus you give a player that counts immediately against your cap and spreads it out over more years.

For example, we sign a player to a $30M bonus over three years. That’s a $10M cap hit each of the years unless structured differently but for simplicity sake we’ll smooth it out. We want to sign other players and need a cap hit this year of less than $10M for the guy so we add ‘void’ years to the contract structure which says we’ll pay the bonus out over five years vs. three so the annual hit now is $30M/5 or $6M/yr. instead of $10M.

The catch is when those players are cut or leave, you save cap space for their remaining contract value but not their signing bonus, which becomes ‘dead’ cap. It’s money that you already paid the player but haven’t taken the cap hit yet. It’s to prevent teams from offering players absurdly low contracts with huge bonuses then adding void years and cutting the player before their contract is done. Player still gets paid, but you circumvent the cap hit.

You can elect to take void years dead cap over the life of what you signed them for or take it all in one season. Licht (correctly) volunteered to take it all now so we don’t have a ton of dead cap when it’s time to re-sign Shaq, Davis, Wirfs, etc. So next season we’ll have a boatload of money to spend.

A chunk of that will be eaten up re-signing our core guys - especially the defensive ones - and if you believe Licht re-signing ME13, but we’ll have plenty of cash to go after whatever position we want. This was always the plan when we used void years (which most teams do) to stay under the cap and still sign all those free agents during our SB run. If you ever wondered how we fit it in under the cap - here’s your answer and this season is the backside of it.