I read somewhere yesterday (probably a small blurb on houstonprofootball.com or something like it) that the Texans may be frontloading their free agent signings with sizable roster bonuses in combination with the normal signing bonuses. The roster bonus counts on the salary cap entirely in the year it is earned, where the signing bonus is prorated throughout the contract. The moral of the story is that the Texans are greatly overpaying (in terms of cap dollars) some players this year so that the Texans will have 1-2 million dollars extra under the cap in future years than they should if this is correct.
Sounds smart to me. They don't plan on competing for a superbowl this year (although they could end up with a pretty good record) so this gives them extra for other years.
I was quite surprised they didn't do this in earlier seasons, or maybe they did and I just didn't know about it. It seems a huge waste to actually have more than emergency cap room during the season, when you can always fill it up by front-loading some contracts.
This is how the Skins have been able to sign everyone in sight and still not be in cap hell....yet. And you know the NFL, monkey see monkey do.
BRILLIANT!!! I thought the skins were backloading, desperate to win right away. How else could they continue signing all these players and trading picks for overpaid wastes like James Thrash?
For most franchises that are building teams, frontloading is the way to go. That's what the Lions did with the signings of Woody and Bryant, frontloading so that later on down the road, they have more cap space to resign key players without cutting others. Now the Redskins are doing the opposite, backloading,which will give them a lot of salary space to sign a lot of FAs for the next year maybe 2, but after that they have to start over, almost from scratch.
The Vikings did this too with Winfield. But on top of that the Vikings cap this year is something like $20M higher than everyone elses. Basically they filled the remainder of their cap space in previous years with "likely to be earned" incentives, when they were not reached they received a credit towards the cap the next year. The part I don't uderstand is how they made "likely to be earned" incentives so unlikely to happen. I remember reading one was for a backup DB to have 5 ints in the final game of the season. Seems kind of crooked to me.
