The Cap Doctor
Will Terrell Suggs take a pay cut? In today’s weekly edition of the Cap Doctor addresses this question along with other cap related questions such as the affordability of Kelechi Osemele and how the Ravens cap management compares to other NFL teams.
Q. No one expect Terrell Suggs to perform as he has in the past coming off a second Achilles tear. Do you expect the Ravens to ask him to take a pay cut and if so, borrowing from what the team did with Lardarius Webb last season, could you model a fair hypothetical contract?
ANSWER: Earlier this week, Jason LaCanfora of CBS Sports touched on this subject and indicated that the Ravens should not expect Suggs to accept anything less than his scheduled $4.5M base salary. LaCanfora’s report certainly looks like a “shot across the bow” from Suggs’ agent warning the Ravens that any requests for a pay cut are a non-starter. The report also serves as notice to other teams that Suggs could become available at some point if the Ravens aren’t buffing and follow through and release him.
LaCanfora speculated further that, given the league-wide need for pass rushers, Suggs could expect to receive more than $4.5M this year if the Ravens were to set him free. LaCanfora even mentions Arizona, Suggs’ home state, as a possible destination.
What LaCanfora does not mention, though, is the reality of how Suggs’ release would affect the Ravens’ Salary Cap. Due to Suggs’ contract extension in 2014 and simple restructure in 2015, the Ravens still have $8.85M in dead money that must be dealt with. As such, releasing him (or trading him) prior to June 1st would cause the $8.85M to count against the Cap, which would be $1.4M more than the $7.45M that Suggs is presently set to count against the Cap.
It’s because of this dead money that the Ravens really don’t have much leverage to force any kind of pay cut because of the damage it would do to the team’s Cap. After all, is the team really going to cut him and have him end up costing more if he rebuffs their efforts to reduce his Cap number?
So, the only conceivable way the Ravens would release Suggs would be via a post-June 1 release, which would save the team $4.5M this year, but would push $5.9M in dead money into 2017. It’s possible that they would decide to make that move, but that’s still a lot of dead money to push into the future.
Q. With Nick Boyle again suspended, this time for 10 games, does his remaining salary (what is left after he loses the suspension time dollars) have to be accounted in the cap at the start of the season, or is it also suspended from cap accountability until Boyle activates?
ANSWER: Boyle’s suspension is going to cost him 10/17ths of his $525K base salary (players get paid for the Bye week, so their salaries are divided by 17 weeks). That $308,824 will be credited against the Ravens Cap (although it’s not actually deducted until Boyle begins to serve his suspension in September). At that time, only the remaining 6/17ths of his base salary will remain on the Cap. This, though, really operates as a wash since the salary of his replacement over those 10 weeks essentially replaces the Cap credit the team gets from Boyle’s suspension.
The Ravens, as they have done with players who were suspended in the past (Asa Jackson, Christian Thompson), will likely seek forfeiture of bonus money already paid to Boyle. Pursuant to the terms of the league’s CBA, if a player is unavailable to his team (via suspension, in this case), the team can pursue bonus forfeiture and deduct that amount from his salary for the remaining years of his contract. As a 5th round pick, this won’t amount to very much in Boyle’s case, but for a team with a tight Cap, every little bit helps.
Q. A couple weeks ago you addressed a question about franchising Osemele, which certainly seems unlikely. My question is whether you can tease out a scenario where they sign him to a long term deal?
The supposition has always been that once Yanda was re-signed they couldn’t afford to pay top dollar for a bookend guard. But if they think enough of K.O.’s audition at left tackle to make a run at signing him to play there for the next few years, with Urschel slotted-in next to him at guard, while jettisoning Monroe, what are the realistic chances of making that happen under the cap?
ANSWER: It appears that Osemele is looking for a top of the market deal, so it remains to be seen if the Ravens are going to be willing to outbid the market. If they were inclined to do so, they could make it work because the Cap number of the first year of a long term deal is usually its lowest. This is the case because the player’s base salary can be very low when he’s just received a large signing bonus a couple of months before. For instance, if Osemele received the same deal that Monroe received in 2014 (5 years, $37.5M, $11M bonus), he would have a 1st year Cap number of $3.2M.
Now, I do think, 2 seasons later, that Osemele may very well top those numbers, even from teams planning to play him as a Guard. If the Ravens consider him to be a LT, which it appears they do, it’ll be even more. Top 10 Left Tackle money starts at $9M per year. Even so, Osemele with a 1st year Cap number of $4M would likely be workable for the Ravens if they are willing to find the Cap space to accommodate it. Part of that, especially if they were going to play KO at LT, would come from releasing Monroe, which would create $2.1M in Cap savings and would create a decent offset to Osmele’s new Cap number.
Not that KO’s agent isn’t going to already know the market, but if the Ravens don’t get Osemele done before the opening of the market on March 9th, I’ve got to think that he’s gone. At that point, the price will truly go through the roof.
Q. The Ravens are often criticized for the way in which they manage the cap, specifically they rarely seem to have the maneuverability that other teams enjoy when the new league year comes knocking. How do they compare to other teams that have been regular playoff participants?
ANSWER: The Ravens’ Cap issues come from several sources – (1) the new CBA in 2011 dropped the Cap by more than $10M and left it relatively flat for the next couple of years and (2) the Ravens have had several contracts (Rice, Pitta, Monroe) that have – for a variety of reasons – blown up on them. Some of those were chance and some were self-inflicted.
The new CBA of 2011 kind of put the Ravens behind the eight ball and left them very tight against the Cap. As such, they were forced to rely on contracts that included larger bonuses and back-loaded Cap numbers. This allowed them to keep the Cap numbers low in the early years and fit more guys under the Cap, but created a lot of potential dead money in the deals. And when (1) things went south for Ray Rice, (2) Ngata reached the last too expensive year of his contract, (3) Pitta got hurt again and (4) Monroe failed to stay healthy and perform well in the 2nd year of a 5-year deal, all of those conspire to create the mess the Ravens have been in the last couple of years. Now, in 2016, they’ve got Flacco’s escalating contract and his $28.55M Cap number added to the mix.
As far as how they handle the Cap compared to other successful teams, I don’t think there really is a standard and every team ends up having some bad contracts. The Ravens had a very clean Cap – with ample Cap room from year to year – from 2003 until 2011. Things changed at that point, but had the Cap not decreased by $10M (not sure anyone, but the NFL Management Council, saw that coming) and continued to increase at the old rate, they probably would have been OK. As recently as 2014, the Ravens entered March with plenty of Cap space (even after re-signing Pitta, Monroe, Darryl Smith, Jacoby Jones).
One thing many other teams do, that the Ravens didn’t do in the past, is to craft contracts with a flatter contract structure – i.e. not such a huge disparity from the 1st year Cap number to the last. While the deals haven’t worked out for other reasons, the contracts for Pitta and Monroe were more flat in structure and hopefully signaled a departure from the past reliance on back-loaded deals. That said, with what appears to be another tight Cap in 2016, it’s not hard to envision the Ravens again relying on back-loaded Cap number deals.
Hopefully, they won’t, but until they truly try and clean up their Cap by getting rid of their worst contracts, they really won’t be able to get back to having ample Cap space on an annual basis.
