The official cap number determines what the team can do in that cap year, with regard to signing or extending other players in a given year.
Originally Posted by: earthquake
Except the official cap is easily manipulated based on if the money is based salary or a signing bonus.
And the official pay determines the official cap... so the official cap is really a secondary figure for understanding anything except are they over or under the limit for this given year. A single year alone, literally does nothing else in the larger picture.
The number paid to the player in a specific year is often different than the cap figure. While interesting in an academic sense, it is irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
Originally Posted by: earthquake
Considering the official pay is what determines the official salary cap it's not irrelevant at all... fans determine things based off the salary cap and can't seem to follow how the NFL handles all the cap numbers, when it's actually quite easy when you just follow the actual money as the actual money determines the cap.
People were arguing with me that we couldn't cut Nick Perry based his cap number and dead money hit.... I argued that based on the actually money you have to cut him... teams use the actual money to set up the cap. While the media and fan's follow the cap as it's somehow more important... when as long as you're under the limit, it's not important at all... it's just accounting for the actual cash money.
The only situation this would matter is if for some reason the Packers couldn't afford to pay the money and had to file for bankruptcy or something. Or if you're very interested in how a player is filing their taxes or something like that.
Originally Posted by: earthquake
Not true at all... first off as an accountant, I might be very interested in how they're filling out their taxes 😁
But a much more important role is cost benefit analysis of whether to keep a player or not and how much it's costing to keep a player vs how much will it cost to get rid of a player.
Which is how I correctly predicted getting rid of Perry and keeping Graham.
People claimed we couldn't get rid of Perry because of the dead cap hit, but most of that was a sink cost meaning we were going to be hit with it no matter weather we kept him or got rid of him... and was a non-factor in the decision... just the new money was a factor.
People looked at Graham's cap number and said he had to go at that price, but part of that cap number was already paid in terms of signing bonus and no way they were getting that back.
I forget the actual numbers, but when Peppers cap number got huge in the final years, people demanding that he take at least a 4 million salary cut because that was too much to make in a single year.... but what they didn't realize is that 4 million of that cap number was already paid to him in the very first year and he actually wasn't making it that year, just that it was being accounted for that year.
The actual cash numbers matter a hell lot more to math nerds that actually understand what's going on...
As you can manipulate the hell out of the cap and the NFL cap is set up to allow teams to easily do that.... the cap follows the money, so to understand the cap, you follow the money... and the cap becomes quite easily to understand.