This is so far from the truth about our cap situation, and it reveals the flaw in how many of the financially conservative fans on here think about the cap.
The NFL salary cap is not your monthly household budget. It doesn’t work the same way. The people who think it does are the ones who think we’re capped out every off-season only to watch us acquire players like Jalen Ramsey and then swear our overspending will catch up to us the next year, which it doesn’t, ad infinitum. There are ways to overspend in the present to hamstring your future. The ways to do that are by adding void years or guaranteeing cap hits way beyond a player’s fair market value in the future, in order to save money today. We have not done either of those things with anyone currently under contract.
Again, this isn’t a household budget. If you need $200 to buy groceries, you can’t guarantee the store $600 in future purchases to get the groceries for $25 today then decide you don’t actually want all that many groceries in the future to cut the cost from $600 to $375.
Now, does this mean we won’t ever have cap problems? Of course not. But if we have cap problems in the future, it’s not going to be because we’re overspending right now. We’re not. It’s going to be because we have too many good players who we want to keep under contract, and it’s impossible to keep a team full of highly priced veterans. That is true no matter what we do with Cook today.