Gibbs the GM

[CrazyCanuck]

Originally Posted by #56fanatic

what are you talking about. DEADMONEY is money we are paying players that are not playing with the skins. How is that a good thing? We payed Deon for two years after he wasn't here. Trotter comes off after THIS YEAR. The trade for Coles is another couple of years, or it may all be this year, not really sure about how that one worked out, I know it was 9 million penalty.

The examples you give about Deion, Trotter, Coles are not wrong. The problem in these cases is that the players left or were cut even earlier than expected. Hopefully with Coach Gibbs bringing in "Redskins" these unexpected and early cuts will be at a minimum in the future.

But let's take Coles as an example. We are paying $9M of our 2005 deadcap towards Coles, and our total 2005 deadcap is close to $20M! That's almost 25% of our total cap for nothing. How can we possibly be competitive? It's because the deadcap is offset by bargains in the short-term. Look at some our other 2005 cap hits:

Chris Samuels $4,768
Sean Taylor $3,970
Mark Brunell $2,433
Clinton Portis $2,386
Shawn Springs $2,373
Jon Jansen $2,143
Randy Thomas $1,952
C. Griffin $1,923
M. Washington $1,707
Walt Harris $1,415
Santana Moss $1,140
David Patten $1,115
Casey Rabach $1,040
James Thrash $896
Ladell Betts $720
Joe Salave'a $707
Pierson Prioleau $690
Lemar Marshall $637
Mike Sellers $590

You can argue as to which of these are actual bargains, but I think we'd all agree most are cheap compared to their market value. If you add up all the savings here there's defintely more than a few million dollars. So yes if we never gave out signing bonuses, we wouldn't have Coles' ugly deadcap hit. But we also wouldn't have a starting QB at $2.4M, a starting RB at $2.4M, a #1 receiver at $1M, etc. You get the picture.

The key is to pick the right players that will be around for a while, so you don't get too much deadcap when you do have to cut them. And it seems we've been doing a much better job of this lately.