"Salary cap crunch"

[SErebel11]

I see a lot of people anticipating a saturated market in the next few weeks with the view that the Bengals are in great shape due to their cap situation. While that is partially true, in my opinion the vast majority of players that this is going to affect are players who are expected to sign a 1 year deal because their cap hit will be a dollar for dollar hit. Anyone signing multi year deals won't be affected as much as people think because money can be pushed back into other seasons cap.

I am going to give a couple of for instances here.

Gabe Jackson was slated to make around 9.6M dollars. His play last season should match him up to make 5-6M dollars next season and he is worthy of a multiyear deal. So, let's say the a team decides to sign him for 2 years 12 million. His cap for this season could be 4M and 8M for next if a bonus is given. 2M base and 4M bonus (signing) and base salary 6M next season.

Kevin Zeitler is slated to make 12M this season. His valuation according to some websites is around 7M for next season. He is potentially being cut because teams are having to be extremely fiscally responsible but that doesn't mean Zeitler is going to struggle to find a new home or have to take some lowball deal to find a new place to play.
He could sign a deal in the range of 3 years/21M deal which would be in line with his valuation from last seasons performance and his current age and the contract be structured in a way that the cap hit this season is not prohibitive to signing him. 2M base salary with 7M signing bonus. Then, base salary of 6M and 6M and his cap hit for this season is 4.3M.

In other words, there are a slew of teams that can afford a 4M or 4.3M dollar cap hit to upgrade at G for this season. In theory, there are 64 starting guards in the league. Having 6-7 solid options on the free agent market isn't saturating it by no means. Now, maybe only a select few teams have the space to go for the top 2 guards but there is very little prohibitive about signing one of the mid-tier guys to a smaller multi year deal.

So, while people are thinking the market is saturated. When Oakland left Jackson go, they became a suitor for a G. They could potentially move on from an overpaid player to a properly compensated player like Zeitler and save 5.6M on this seasons cap.

If Jacksonville moves on from Norwell, they could then be a suitor for Scherff or Thuney with their massive amount of cap space to spend.