Mike Florio

Most contracts now, second contracts, third contracts, big money deals, they have a provision in there that gives the team the automatic right to restructure.

And it's simply, and I'll keep the numbers as basic as I can, just so I don't short circuit my own brain.

If somebody's due to make $30 million this year in salary,

You take that $30 million, you reduce the salary down to the minimum for that player's years of experience, and the rest of it gets treated as a signing bonus, and the money gets spread over five years.

And so 80% of those cap dollars get pushed out to future years.

That's the easy way to do it.

Every year, oh, what was this team?

What was that team?

Oh, they're never going to figure it out.

And they always figure it out.

The Saints are the best example.

Every year, how are they ever going to get out of this cap mess?

And they get out of it.

And the thing that helps teams is the cap keeps going up and up and up.

So if you can take current cap dollars and shove them into future years when the cap is higher, the relative impact of that cap dollar is lesser.

That dollar I would take this year means less in a future year because the cap keeps going up and up.

So that's the key.

If we ever get to the point where the cap starts going down, kicking the can becomes a problem.

And we may get back to one of those times.

I remember we used to hear the term salary cap purgatory.