2016 Cap Analytics: Cincinnati Bengals

The Bengals are one of only two teams (the Seahawks are the other) with no players who can be considered more likely to be released than not, and as a result the team has the lowest expected change in salary cap room in the entire league.  Further, the team’s 4^th place ranking in True Cap Space and 26^th place ranking in Commitment Index show that these high Expected Outcomes are not a result of heavily mortgaged contracts that would be painful to terminate from a salary cap perspective.  On the contrary, the team has consistently demonstrated an ability to both accurately forecast which players will perform well in the future and to capitalize on negotiating leverage to design team-friendly contracts.

Absent from the Bengals cap sheet are the needless Accelerated Future Team Option Deadlines and option bonuses that litter the cap sheets of other teams with avoidable risk.  Every contract involves a tradeoff between the team and player as to contractual risk (guaranteed money), potential for surplus value (total contract value) and optionality (number of nonguaranteed contract seasons).  The Bengals seem to consistently secure team-friendly or team-neutral terms as to all three considerations.  In this respect, the Bengals can be considered arguably the most effective salary cap management front office in the league.

Expected Contract Outcomes – Expected Contract Value 2.0 utilizes an algorithm based on a player’s contract characteristics, age, position and 2015 performance to forecast probabilities as to the outcomes of contract termination decisions.   The lower the Expected Outcome, the more likely the player’s contract will be terminated in 2016.  A pay cut is treated as a termination.  We have applied ECV 2.0 to all contracts scheduled to count $2 million or more against the 2016 salary cap with the exception of exercised 5^th year rookie options.  Expected Savings is the calculated by multiplying the probability a player will be released by the cap savings realized by the team upon such release.

True Cap Space – Realizable Cap Space depicts the total amount of salary cap space potentially at the team’s disposal in 2016, and True Cap Space makes further adjustments to take into consideration amounts that are accounted for in practical terms.  Most True Cap Space will be used on players currently under contract as a result of the team choosing to not release them.

Commitment Index – Commitment Index identifies the degree to which a team has “mortgaged its future” by measuring its net future salary cap commitments as a percentage of the average net future salary cap commitments of all teams.  A Commitment Index Score of 100% is average, and a negative Commitment Index Score indicates that the team has more current salary cap space than future salary cap commitments.  The Commitment Index Score of every team in the league changes to at least some degree with every transaction executed by any team in the league, so Commitment Index Score is measured as of a specific point in time (in this case, January 11, 2016).