NFL insider notes: Cowboys have spent the least on payroll since 2016, why cash trumps cap, new CBA and more
Cap discourse often excludes the numbers that matter, so here's a look at the real bottom feeders
By Jason La Canfora
Mar 6, 2020 at 10:36 am ET•6 min read
"NFL fans get preconditioned to obsess over the salary cap. This time of year in particular, with free agency about to begin and players being cut around the league because of their cap figures, so much of the pro football conversation gets dominated by how much cap space teams have, or lack of it.
Of course, with a soft cap, the dirty little secret is, and always has been, that cash trumps cap and there are myriad ways to convert salaries and create space and continue to have a means to spend. Even teams seemingly caught in a bind routinely find ways to extend players or apply the franchise tag to players despite those confines ... as long as ownership is willing to foot the bill and keep writing checks.
The discourse of the cap, most often, excludes the true numbers that matter, and the metric that tells the story about which funds were actually poured into the product in pursuit of victories. Despite this being far and away the greatest revenue-generating sport in this country, and despite the owners sharing a revenue model in which massive cash subsidies arrive every year from the television contracts alone, we generally don't speak about payroll in the NFL the way we do in other sports. It's all cap, cap, cap.
We think of huge-pocketed guys like Jerry Jones, whose big personalities have become woven into the very fabric of the game, as massive spenders doing whatever it takes to win, even if it means bidding against himself. We focus on the snapshot of two desperate teams over-spending on some mediocre free agent and lose sight of how much money so many teams are bringing in, and forget which owners aren't exactly threatening to spend up to the cap in any given year, let alone over it."
It's an old article, but more of the same this season after spending money on Dak the last couple of years.
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-insider-notes-cowboys-have-spent-the-least-on-payroll-since-2016-why-cash-trumps-cap-new-cba-and-more/