Twitter & More Q&A- February 20

I thought rather than answering questions directly on Twitter I would do a feature every now and then where I look at some of the questions asked over the last day or two so there is a record of it for all to see and not limit the answers to 140 characters or to have it buried in the comments section. And of course I want to preface all of this by saying that these answers related to contract questions are based on data that I believe to be reasonably accurate, but I cant say with 100% certainty is correct.

From @SGininger:  Is it true that the Skins cap penalty allows them to cut Hall without any dead money counting against them?

Yes that should be accurate. The Redskins signed DeAngelo Hall to a 6 year contract in 2009 that called for an option bonus of $15 million to be paid in 2010, which was the uncapped year. When it came time to pay the bonus the Redskins changed the terms a bit by giving Hall the ability to void the final 4 years of his contract by paying the Redskins back the money he earned in 2009 and 2010. Under the CBA, void seasons where the player has the sole control of voiding the contract can not be used for the purposes of prorating bonuses. What that meant was rather than prorating $15 million dollars at $3 million per season all $15 million counted on the 2010 salary cap books. In addition his prior signing bonus money all accelerated into 2010 thus leaving no dead money on the books for future years. In all the Redskins dumped $19.7 million  into the uncapped year for Hall when his normal charge would have been $3.8 million. So if Hall is released there is no dead money left on the books with his name on it, though part of the penalty is, in essence, what his dead money should have been if released this year.

From @Donkey_Kang: How does the SD Chargers’ cap situation look like? Besides Antonio Garay, who else is likely to be cut?

I wanted to go over all the teams this offseason but I sadly will not be able to do that due to time constraints, but I can do a quick overview here. I would not expect the Chargers to be much in the way of players this offseason. I currently have them around $5.9 million in cap room on a $121.1 million cap limit, but they only have 47 players under contract which mean most of their rookie class will see the full dollar value hit the cap. When you consider their rookies should cost around $5.2 million it leaves almost no spending room between now and July.

Beyond cutting Garay there are only minimal savings deals on the team. Takeo Spikes saves the team $3 million and backup Charlie Whitehurst a bit over $2 million if released. Releasing WR Eddie Royal would save $1.5 million. I think the big decision is what the team wants to do with Phillip Rivers who was bad last season. He has a $17.11 million dollar cap hit this year and they could bring that lower if they extend him. With almost no dead money on the books in 2014 for him this seems to essentially be a contract year for him.

From Guest in comments: What gives with the change in Kevin Boss’ dead money charge?

Like I have mentioned before we arent perfect and while we strive to do our best to compile the figures we definitely make mistakes in calculations and/or assumptions, and sometimes just get bad information. Boss’ deal was one with conflicting numbers and I was wrong. Luckily for us someone I greatly trust was able to correct the error so we have it right. While our analysis I believe is top notch and the site among the best cap resources you will find there are others who are going to be better connected  when it comes to getting perfect data on contracts. We come close but cant be right all the time. So anytime anyone sees a mistake or has a tip, no matter how small, trust me it helps if you shoot me an email or a DM so we can get it fixed.

From @BobbyMaz They (Green Bay) have to restructure Finley. Are they going to keep him at 8.75 this year?

When you see teams sign what are “premier” players to two year contracts most often they doing it because they have no intention of keeping them for too long. Green Bay’s intention was never to hold onto Finley and I would guess that he will be released to create more cap space. I’d be surprised if they extended him.

From @NickSpano Whoa! Jason from @nyjetscap and now @Jason_OTC has a face!? Same person!?

LOL. I already answered Nick who has been a great follower of my work for sometime but yes for those unsure of it I am also the founder and editor of www.nyjetscap.com, a site primarily devoted to tracking the Jets salary cap. Ill post some links to that site every now and then or double post on the two sites, but nyjetscap is really where I learned about the cap and became pretty good and the analytic end of it. OTC is a much more in depth venture and unlike nyjetscap, which was always just me, Ill be getting some help here. More to come on that in the coming weeks but I think you will really enjoy reading our teams thoughts and cap analysis. There are some great “amateur capologists” out there and we definitely will have some of the best posting at OTC and helping keep this massive database as accurate as possible.

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