The Eagles Dead Cap Isn’t a Failure… It’s a Feature

You can call me crazy, but if I could have one job with an NFL team, besides GM, it would be “the salary cap guy”. I probably never talked about this, but I’m an economist by education and as complicated and at times non-sensical as the cap can be, I love it.

And the cap, particularly dead cap, has been a big topic this off-season. It looms over every decision or player move like a bankruptcy… “the Eagles may have $50M of dead cap in 2025” or “we can’t release Bradberry because of his dead cap hit” are common concerns.

Dead cap isn’t in itself an issue, it’s a feature of the Eagles salary cap approach.

It’s almost all planned in. It’s expected. And it’s beneficial.

And it shouldn’t force you to make a bad decision to keep a bad player.

First, I assume most know what dead cap is but, in case not as I have gotten a lot of questions recently on it, a quick primer.

When a player gets a bonus, that bonus is pro-rated over the life of the contract, up to a maximum of 5 years. The money was already paid to the player, but for salary cap accounting, it doesn’t count all at once.

For example, let’s use James Bradberry‘s initial 2022 contract with the Eagles which was:

• 1-year contract with 4 void years
• Total contract of $7.25M with a $1.035M salary and $6.215M bonus

Bradberry was immediately paid the full bonus and then $57,500 each week (the salary divided into 18 weekly payments), actually receiving the full $7.25M by the end of the 2022 season. That’s how the money actually changed hands.

But from a cap perspective, his 1-year contract was actually a 5-year contract – one “real” year where he was on the team and four void years whose only purpose was to push pro-rated bonus into future.

Here is how his $7.25M contract was accounted for:

	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026
Salary	$1.035M	void	void	void	void
Bonus	$1.243M	$1.243M	$1.243M	$1.243M	$1.243M
Cap Hit	$2.278M
Dead Cap		$4.972M

He only had a $2.278M cap hit in 2022 and then an expected $4.972M cap hit in 2023 from the remaining dead cap in the non-playing void years if he was not re-signed (which he obviously was).

Hopefully that’s straightforward. Now on to the “why”…

The best analogy for dead cap is it’s an interest-free loan. And that’s exactly how Howie sees it:

It’s no different than when you’re trying to buy a house. If you have the opportunity to buy a house and put all the cash down or the interest rates are really good and you’re going to pay it over time, why wouldn’t you use that money now and understand that as it goes forward you’re going to be able to do that? 

Howie Roseman in Reuben Frank’s 2022 NBC Sports article “Why Eagles GM Howie Roseman isn’t concerned with millions in dead money”

Why do this? Two reasons:

1. You can afford a better roster in the short-term
The Eagles got a $7M cornerback for their Super Bowl run for only $2.278M against the 2022 cap. To put the value in player terms, this allowed the Eagles to also sign other players totaling $5M, for example Kyzir White ($3M) and Ndamukong Suh ($2M), that they wouldn’t have been able to fit.

2. Future cap dollars are worth less than today cap dollars
And not only do you “pay it back” later with no interest, with the salary cap increasing every year Howie takes the cap hit in the future where that money is a smaller percentage of the cap. Howie hit this point as well:

It’s all the same amount of money, it’s just when you choose to do it. From our perspective, it felt like the way the cap is going to go going forward, it made sense to have the option to take it in future years.

Howie Roseman, 2022

If you get dead cap, you can skip this section. But if not, I’ll try to make an analogy to our non-professional football player worlds.

Using an interest-free loan to buy a car

Going back to the interest-free loan analogy, say you make $50,000 a year (your salary cap) and you always wanted to buy a Porsche (your Bradberry). You find an older, used one with a bunch of miles on it for $10,000. It may not last but hey, you got your Porsche.

You could save up and just buy it but since you have access to a 5-year interest-free loan (good luck with that in the real world), you take the loan and pay $2,000 a year for thr car over 5 years.

Raises reduce the payment burden

But let’s say you also get 10% raises every year. Again, good luck with that in the real world, but I’m using 10% because that’s how much the salary cap has gone up annually since 2021.

In 5 years, you will be making just over $80,000 a year (your new salary cap). That same $2,000 car payment was a fairly sizable 4% of your income in the first year, but by year 5 it’s now only 2.5% of your income.

To make this more accurate with the Bradberry example, say you made a mistake and the high-mile Porsche you bought started breaking down two years in. You decide to scrap it and pay off the remaining $6,000 loan. But you are also making $60,500 then due to your raises – a much easier burden for you than it was two years ago. We don’t have the concept of void years here, but the final 3 years of your loan act like them.

Imperfect example but it works.

Most of the league has loved dead cap since 2021

Ever since the salary cap surprisingly shrank for the first time in 2021 due to Covid revenue losses, teams have been more aggressive using void years and dead cap – before 2021, the league averaged around 12% of the cap allocated to dead cap but since 2021, dead cap use has ballooned, now averaging over 17%.

The Eagles as “leaders” in dead cap

But the Eagles have been even more aggressive, averaging over $60M in dead cap annually and 30% of the cap since 2021, top in the league over the 2021-23 period.

Not only did the salary cap contraction help drive this increase for the Eagles, but they also had to deal with Carson Wentz‘s at-the-time-highest $33.8M dead cap hit in 2021.

But the Eagles were on a path to higher dead cap numbers anyway. Looking at the three-year periods before and after Covid, the Eagles have increased dead cap usage the most in the league, increasing almost 20% from the 2018-20 period.

You can make what you want of the company the Eagles are in with Chicago, Houston, Tampa Bay, and the Rams as the most aggressive dead cap teams…

The Chiefs as a counter example

And note that today’s dynasty – the Chiefs – who weren’t big users of dead cap prior to Covid, have actually further reduced their dead cap usage, now 4th lowest in the league at only 7% of their cap space in the 2021-23 period. GM Brett Veach is a contrast to Howie, largely avoiding dead cap.

As an example, this past off-season the Chiefs reworked holdout DT Chris Jones‘ contract and gave him $6.75M in new money. They added 4 void years on his deal but it only added $3.4M of dead cap after the 2023 season, giving the Chiefs a total of $4M on the books so far for 2024. That’s a big difference from numbers that notable Eagles would have.

Not saying this is better or worse, it’s just a different approach.

Looking ahead on the Eagles situation

Wentz’s hit was unplanned but even removing him, the Eagles were going to have over $30M of dead cap in 2021 that was planned for in deals they signed. The same with 2022 and 2023.

But looking ahead, the Eagles only have $4.2M dead cap for the 2024 season. We may be headed back towards fiscal responsibility, right?

Nope. It will probably come down some from their recent levels, but it will still be a sizable number.

Mariota will add another $3.0M. If Kelce and Cox retire, at best another $12.9M of dead cap is added, taking them over $20M. This is all “planned-for” dead cap as Kelce’s and Cox’s contracts were intentionally set up this way.

And then there are the optional moves they could make. If they release Byard which is highly likely, add another $1.4M. Release Avonte? $7.7M. Bradberry? $15.2M. Maybe all won’t be released but that’s $44.2M of dead cap. Sounds like a lot but at only 18.2% of the cap, that would be the lowest amount the Eagles have had since 2020 and pretty close to the league average.

I mentioned “planned for” dead cap which is dead cap that is going to happen no matter what. It isn’t the result of signing a bad deal and releasing a player sooner than expected. It’s like Kelce’s dead cap – Howie, knowing it was likely he was retiring, intentionally pushed bonus money out past when he will be done playing.

Here is a view on “planned for” dead cap for the Eagles. These won’t hit exactly as shown below, this is just a view of “if the contracts played out as constructed”.

As you can see, the dead cap is going nowhere. Without counting any new deals that will surely add more, there is $142M of dead cap scheduled over the next three years, an average of $47M per year. Some of this will not hit with extensions, but that just further pushes it out – it is all still there.

	2024	2025	2026
Existing dead cap	4.2
Marcus Mariota	3.0
Jason Kelce (*6/1 designation)	8.7	16.4
Fletcher Cox (*6/1 designation)	4.2	10.1
Brandon Graham		6.8
Haason Reddick		14.8
Josh Sweat		9.7
Avonte Maddox		5.2
Jake Elliott		3.3
James Bradberry			7.8
Darius Slay			14.4
Jordan Mailata			6.9
AJ Brown			20.2
Dallas Goedert			5.9
Total	20.1	66.3	55.2

Is the Eagles dead cap usage a smart and innovative way to get ahead of the league? Or is it to be avoided? It’s not that simple as it can be both.

Ultimately, the only thing that matters is signing players to good contracts.

If you sign somebody to a deal where they are productive through the contract and use void years to push cap out, it does nothing but benefit you by allowing you to “pay back” this money with cheaper future dollars. This is Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox and hopefully Darius Slay, Reddick, and AJ Brown.

But if you make a mistake like Bradberry, then the dead cap is a problem where you either have cap space allocated to a player that is not on the team or not providing value. But the problem is the bad deal, not the dead cap… the alternative was to count all the money in the current years.

What’s even worse, though, is keeping a player for no other reason than their dead cap hit.

This is where we are with Bradberry. It was a bad decision signing an over-30 year old CB to a three-year deal with a planned contract out (based on guaranteed money and dead cap) after two years, not one.

So now you have to decide, do you keep him on the roster in 2024, hoping he returns to form, or do you admit the mistake, move on, and live with the dead cap?

That it was a bad deal doesn’t affect where we are – that decision was made and that money was spent. It’s a sunk cost.

These are the questions that I think are the important ones:

• Was his 2023 drop-off a trend to continue or an aberration?
• Is he going to be one of the top 6 or 7 corners on the team in 2024? Is he even going to make the team with Slay, Rodgers, Kelee, Ricks, Jobe, Zech, Avonte, Goodrich, and any other CBs they may draft or sign?
• If you keep JBJ, are you ok releasing a younger, cheaper CB with maybe more upside?
• If you are trying to compete for the Super Bowl, is he a guy that makes you better after seeing teams relentlessly target him late in the season?
• And yes, releasing JBJ pulls dead cap forward and “wastes” $10.9M of 2024 cap space but then “benefits” 2025 cap space by $7.9M… do you think differently knowing it is a net $3M hit vs. what was planned (he has a $7.9 of dead cap after he is done with Philly no matter what)?

This isn’t meant to be a Bradberry article, but he is a really interesting example of void years, dead cap, and decisions to be made when contracts don’t work out. To me, you keep the players that give you the best chance of winning, regardless of the dead cap.

So, first, don’t stress on the Eagles dead cap because it isn’t going anywhere. Just sign good players to good deals. And if you made a mistake, move on.

---

Thanks for reading and if you aren’t already, please follow us at:
X: @PhillyCvrCorner, @PhillyEagleNews, and @GregHartPA
Threads: PhillyCoverCorner