The Myth of Having to Go Into a Season With Cap Space

[I_C_DeadPeople]

End of the day there are two issues with the cap management:

First, the Bengals manage their cap in a very conservative manner. Successful teams manage it in an aggressive fashion. That puts us probably $10-$15M BEHIND other teams each year. Other teams know the cap is going up every year so they can push money out in time which the Bengals never do. This also effects how we attempt to re-sign players. Lets use Zeitler - at the time perhaps 5 years at $10M per year seems high, but 3 years later good guards are now at $12-$14M so the latter part of the contract is favorable.

Second, they are inconsistent with the 'we sign our own' - they will let a good player go because they want too much but then then sign others to values far more than they should have. They are not clinical enough in this part of player management.

Now an additional issue is inconsistent coaching and hot/cold drafting - both could be fixed with more/better staff in these areas.

Each one of these in of itself is not the end of the world but combine them all and you have no chance to compete with the best teams.