Breaking down the Bengals cap situation

[BengalChris]

(03-04-2016, 01:40 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: Thank you.  That is the salary cap accounting details which the Bengals never put out with the smoke and mirrors.

Let's say the Bengals draft a 1st round DT and release Peko.  Peko's cap savings would be roughly $3.5M +/-.  Right?  D.J. Humphrey was drafted 24th last year with rookie cap hit of $1.6M.

That's roughly, a ball park $2M cap savings (just to make the math easy for me.)  That cap savings will damn near cover the rest of your rookie pool, correct?  Please let me know if I'm wrong.  Thanks.

The information is out there you just have to know where to find it.

http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/cincinnati-bengals/cap/

You can see the basic data you need at this link. You will note that Peko's contract has no dead money in it, so cutting Peko would save the team 3.75M. But I don't see them doing that because he's a leader on the team and his replacement is nowhere on the roster. They won't cut him and hope a draft pick can fill that roll. They'll keep Peko and hopefully draft a NT to be his eventual replacement.

From scanning through the list of contracts, the ones that I see that could be cut and replaced are Nugent, Hawk and Hunt. But I doubt the team cuts Hawk unless there's a viable alternative drafted. With Burfict out for 3 weeks, the team will feel it needs Hawk in the fold.

The team has plenty of cap space, it just isn't going to use all of it and that's really the issue fans have. Even if they roll over some to next year, there's still plenty left to work with, but won't use it.

In 2015 we used most of our cap space, except $8M and we rolled over $7.5M of that. But we also resigned AJ last year and we had $4.8M is dead money in 2015. This year we only have $192K. So that's $4.6M more to work with. But, if we don't use it, it does no good.