ANSWER: A player’s Cap number is generally made up of 2 components – (1) his base salary and (2) that year’s bonus proration. When a player signs a multiyear contract, he generally receives a signing bonus upon signing and then base salaries for each year of the deal. For Salary Cap purposes, the bonus doesn’t all count in the year it was paid, but is prorated over the life of the deal (w/ 5 years being the maximum).
For example, a player receiving a 4 year, $24M contract that contains an $8M bonus would have a contract breakdown as follows:
So, for 2016, the player’s Cap number is $5M, but they are only paying him $3M in base salary for that year. The other $2M is not cash paid to the player in that year, but that year’s proration from bonus money already paid to the player.
ANSWER: Yes and no. The Ravens were able to keep a pretty clean Cap from 2002 until 2011. The new CBA of 2011 saw the Salary Cap essentially drop by close to $12M and a lot of teams all of a sudden got caught in a difficult Cap situation. The Ravens were one of those teams.
That is why Ngata’s contract (2011) and Flacco’s contract (2013) were structured as they were, (with backloaded Cap numbers) and why both became burdensome. Add to that, contracts – that for a variety of reasons – haven’t worked out (Rice, Webb, Pitta, Monroe?) as expected and you have the reasons for the continuing Cap problems.
So, I would say that some of the problems are self-made, while some are happenstance and/or just plain bad luck.
ANSWER: Certainly in some cases, yes. The contracts for Rice, Webb and Pitta have become problems. It appears that Monroe’s may as well and if Suggs doesn’t return from injury playing top level football, you can add his too.
Again, there are a variety of reasons those deals now look bad and some of it is just you have to take your chances because even the most “safe” contract can turn out to haunt a team.
The contracts given to Rice, Webb and Monroe were market deals when signed. Pitta’s deal was probably (more than) a bit too generous and an argument can certainly be made that they should have foreseen the possibility of re-injury or structured the contract to protect themselves better. Suggs had a great year in the first year of his new deal, but got hurt the next year.
The common adage is that you should get rid of a player “a year early, rather than a year late”. The Ravens appear to have done that with Ngata (or, at least, they held their ground on what they saw as his value), but for Suggs, they may failed to abide by the adage.
Q. What do you think the team will do with Pitta?
ANSWER: If he doesn’t retire first, I would expect Pitta to be released. Pitta is due $5M in base salary in 2016 and I just can’t envision the Ravens paying him that given the risks of re-injury and spending another season on a reserve list. After paying him $4M to spend the season on PUP in 2015, I doubt they’ll take that chance.
They very well may have released him last year, but the dead money was just too much due to his $4M base salary being guaranteed in 2015. With no more guaranteed money around in 2016, and with the dead money being more manageable (albeit still high), there nothing to protect him this time around.
The Ravens have also drafted 3 TEs over the last 2 years and each one has shown promise, so it appears the Ravens have to preparing for the future without Pitta.
Releasing Pitta prior to June 1st will only result in a Cap savings of $600K (with $6.6M in dead money still counting against the 2016 Cap). If they release him after June 1st, they would create $5M in Cap space, while taking on $2.2M in dead money in 2016 and $4.4M in dead money in 2017.
Neither option sounds particularly appetizing, but both are better than paying $5M in cash to a player that you cannot count on any longer.
