ckparrothead
Premium Member
Thread
Short story short, about half of Miami's payroll next year are caught up in guys (e.g. Ryan Tannehill, Robert Quinn, DeVante Parker, Kiko Alonso, Andre Branch, T.J. McDonald, Daniel Kilgore, Ted Larsen) that really don't need to be here...perhaps excepting Tannehill, whose replacement would be a top priority if the Dolphins were to jettison him.
If those 8 players are ditched then Miami's cash payroll is about $120 million short of the expected 2019 payroll budget (i.e. salary cap). That's plenty of space to get the 23 more players you need (at least half of whom will probably be young players that don't cost much).
I know everyone are going to cry about the salary cap. They're going to say I'm off because I'm talking about cash payroll and not salary cap.
The salary cap is an accounting playland with so many accrual entries and mechanisms that it is COMPLETELY manipulable.
All that really matters is that, over time, your cash payrolls approximate the NFL mandated payroll budgets (i.e. salary caps).
And even that doesn't matter as much as you'd think, because 'borrowing' from future salary caps in the NFL is a matter of getting a player to agree to a contract restructure (shifting salary to be paid in game checks from September to January into one lump sum to be paid at time of restructure). Players WANT that. They're incentivized to do it. And they don't charge a dime for it. So imagine you want a loan from a bank, that bank is ALWAYS open, they don't care what your credit rating is, and every loan they give you is ZERO interest.
Except that's not even accurate because in NFL salary cap playland there's an aggressive 5.7% annual inflation rate that is eating away at your debt, making it smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller every year. If you borrow $50 million from the 2021 salary cap into the 2018 salary cap, that $50 million represents 28.2% of the current salary cap. But if the salary cap continues to grow at the 5.7% annualized rate it's been growing since the uncapped year (2010), then the 2021 salary cap will be $209.3 million, and that $50 million debt will only represent about 23.9% of that salary cap.
But remember how I said the bank is always open, because the bank is the players, and the players are always game for a restructure, and they won't even charge you any interest to do it? So what that actually means is you can roll over that $50 million debt basically however long you want. In 50 years you'll have eventually erased the debt almost completely in real terms, though I doubt it'll ever come to that because there will probably be another uncapped year sometime before now and then just like in 2010. An uncapped year would be like a debt jubilee.
Of course, you could just PAY IT BACK. And in order to pay it back all that would mean is that one year, or a series of years, you could have your cash payrolls undershoot the salary cap by $50 million. But that's ****ing boring, even if it's entirely doable.
For the record the Dolphins have had cash payrolls exceed their payroll budgets by a cumulative sum total of $18.5 million since the uncapped year. They have a net of $43 million in accounting expense entries scheduled for 2019 through 2021, that aren't offset by salary cap space roll-forwards. So they've got a little bit of 'credit card' debt already.
As I say in the tweet thread, the dirty secret of the NFL is that the salary cap doesn't matter that much, the salary FLOOR is something that tends to matter more to the NFL owners, and that's because their player compensation budgeting is much more about classic P&L considerations than most people believe.
Short story short, about half of Miami's payroll next year are caught up in guys (e.g. Ryan Tannehill, Robert Quinn, DeVante Parker, Kiko Alonso, Andre Branch, T.J. McDonald, Daniel Kilgore, Ted Larsen) that really don't need to be here...perhaps excepting Tannehill, whose replacement would be a top priority if the Dolphins were to jettison him.
If those 8 players are ditched then Miami's cash payroll is about $120 million short of the expected 2019 payroll budget (i.e. salary cap). That's plenty of space to get the 23 more players you need (at least half of whom will probably be young players that don't cost much).
I know everyone are going to cry about the salary cap. They're going to say I'm off because I'm talking about cash payroll and not salary cap.
The salary cap is an accounting playland with so many accrual entries and mechanisms that it is COMPLETELY manipulable.
All that really matters is that, over time, your cash payrolls approximate the NFL mandated payroll budgets (i.e. salary caps).
And even that doesn't matter as much as you'd think, because 'borrowing' from future salary caps in the NFL is a matter of getting a player to agree to a contract restructure (shifting salary to be paid in game checks from September to January into one lump sum to be paid at time of restructure). Players WANT that. They're incentivized to do it. And they don't charge a dime for it. So imagine you want a loan from a bank, that bank is ALWAYS open, they don't care what your credit rating is, and every loan they give you is ZERO interest.
Except that's not even accurate because in NFL salary cap playland there's an aggressive 5.7% annual inflation rate that is eating away at your debt, making it smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller every year. If you borrow $50 million from the 2021 salary cap into the 2018 salary cap, that $50 million represents 28.2% of the current salary cap. But if the salary cap continues to grow at the 5.7% annualized rate it's been growing since the uncapped year (2010), then the 2021 salary cap will be $209.3 million, and that $50 million debt will only represent about 23.9% of that salary cap.
But remember how I said the bank is always open, because the bank is the players, and the players are always game for a restructure, and they won't even charge you any interest to do it? So what that actually means is you can roll over that $50 million debt basically however long you want. In 50 years you'll have eventually erased the debt almost completely in real terms, though I doubt it'll ever come to that because there will probably be another uncapped year sometime before now and then just like in 2010. An uncapped year would be like a debt jubilee.
Of course, you could just PAY IT BACK. And in order to pay it back all that would mean is that one year, or a series of years, you could have your cash payrolls undershoot the salary cap by $50 million. But that's ****ing boring, even if it's entirely doable.
For the record the Dolphins have had cash payrolls exceed their payroll budgets by a cumulative sum total of $18.5 million since the uncapped year. They have a net of $43 million in accounting expense entries scheduled for 2019 through 2021, that aren't offset by salary cap space roll-forwards. So they've got a little bit of 'credit card' debt already.
As I say in the tweet thread, the dirty secret of the NFL is that the salary cap doesn't matter that much, the salary FLOOR is something that tends to matter more to the NFL owners, and that's because their player compensation budgeting is much more about classic P&L considerations than most people believe.
