I get the argument about upgrading from McCain as the slot CB, and I get the argument about gaining flexibility needed to cut Maxwell. But let's be honest, there is no way the Dolphins are paying Maxwell $10m in 2018 when cutting him then doesn't incur any dead cap money. You're saving $5.5m in 2017 by being able to cut Maxwell. I just can't imagine the Dolphins' front office are projecting Maxwell to be on their roster in 2018, at least not at $10m. That's not to say drafting Tabor and signing Campbell is a bad idea, but I just wanted to point out the loss of cap flexibility in 2018 and beyond which would result from those moves.
Part of what I do for a living involves evaluating companies and their accounting systems. People get too caught up with salary cap accounting accruals in today's NFL. They're too obsessed. They need to be more obsessed with cash flow.
Once upon a time the accrual based accounting system held primacy. With old CBAs, there was no way to move salary cap space forward. You could always roll future cap space backward to the present via amortization, etc. But the cap space you had in the present always died when the year died. No longer the case. Now the accounting is pretty free and fungible.
So as long as you don't have a whole lot of sin money carryover that you're rolling forward, which is to say cash that you've actually paid a guy that exceeds the amount of service he's provided you (in terms of numbers of years multiplied by average compensation per year), then the you mostly just pay attention to the cash flow and make sure that your cash expenditures are within your multi-year budgets. If, after you've planned out your cash expenditures, you find that the accounting figure doesn't match or is going to be problematic, you can plan out how you're going to manipulate the accounting figure (no shortage of options) to make it do what you need it to do. As long as you're not doling out too much cash, it's all going to work out in the end. Back in the day, teams were actually doling out cash well in excess of the salary cap and then attempting to hide it via accrual accounting. That was a no-no. And it's just not happening today.
I give that lecture every time I tell someone how much cash the team is going to save by cutting a player, and they come back and say but they'll only save X amount on the salary cap! It's just not that helpful to think about things that way. Cash first. Accounting figures second.
Incidentally with respect to Byron Maxwell, the Miami Dolphins did not pay his signing bonus. They traded for him. They paid him $8.5 million in salary in 2016 and that was what he cost them in the official accounting figure. No shenanigans there. The complication is that Byron is guaranteed $5 million in 2017, with the Miami Dolphins being the ultimate guarantor. If we cut him, we still may have to pay him up to $5 million. But the thing about that is, it's subject to offset language, which has been standard in every free agent contract the Miami Dolphins have signed for many years now. That offset language may have already existed in his Philly contract, but if it didn't, the Dolphins are certain to have added it in when they edited his contract asking him to give up $1.5 million in 2017 pay in exchange for making $5 million of it guaranteed. The offset language means that if we cut him and he goes and makes $7 million with another team somewhere, we don't have to pay him a dime. But if we cut him and he goes to another team and makes $4 million, then we will have to pay $1 million to make him square with the $5 million guarantee.
