Good read from Jack Duffin on why dead cap is not a bad thing.
Fans and the media worry far more about dead cap than they should. It isn't very relevant if I am honest in terms of previous years' signing and option bonuses. I would rather my team is spending much more than my rivals in a sustainable way in the pursuit of winning. It is like buying something on an interest-free credit card, you have more buying power but you then need to pay it off next year. If you spend 20% of your budget next year every year it is perfectly sustainable as long as your earnings (the salary cap) keep going up.
What you don't want to be doing is eating any guaranteed salary like they had to with Baker Mayfield to facilitate a trade. This is the type of dead cap you want to avoid as you are paying him cash not to play for your team.
34:00 is a great example breaking down contract restructures with players (49ers). 41:00 mark makes reference to what Cleveland is doing and the reasoning as to why.
Damn. Thanks to you and Bull Dawg.
I cringed before I even hit play because all this stuff is very complicated. I only watched from 34:00 on to about 1:10 and learned a lot, not only nuts and bolts, but how it pertains to Haslam, Berry and the Browns.
Bottom line is that there is no real need to get caught up in all the details. The accounting tools made available by the NFL salary cap would make Enron jealous.
The difference between us and other teams is not in the details, but in the approach. The 39:00 mark, and talking about the differences in approach by a team like the Saints and the Browns, exemplifies the difference between Berry's cap management and other teams around the league.
Strong fiscal management = way more flexibility, flexibility means you are never in danger of painting yourself into a corner. Maintaining liquidity, maintaining carry-over cap, walking a fine line with restructures means you're never in danger of choking the life out of available cap.
Berry uses the salary cap like an interest free credit card. He maintains it's interest free status by staying fiscally sound. Staying fiscally sound allows him to easily navigate the future with future money because he's never in danger of paying the bills of now. The Saints could have signed Watson, but that shiny new toy would have been parked in front of a trailer with a leaky roof, mostly because they have put themselves in paycheck-to-paycheck mode.
Combine Berry's next-level understand of the cap that with an owner that can (and is willing to) write any check, and some may say (and have) that you're gaming the system.
And we know that when you can't address a point that is that is brought up you'll consistently shoot the messenger. As I said, we all know how this works.
We all know you'll say things like this while all you do is belabor the obvious and pretend people are avoiding addressing it when it has been addressed so many times that people are sick of you repeating it.
