Re: Jonathan Kraft On Felger and Mazz Last Night
Felger's of the opinion that the Patriots are trying to keep the actual payroll a lot lower than it appears on the cap, and that the team is looking to spend only about $100 million dollars on player salaries. He's able to pull up some data to make his point seem plausible.
Kraft and company can deny that all they want, or they can explain it a way in whatever manner suits them, but the actual dollars spent in recent years has not been "to the cap", which is what Felger is calling them out on. I'm not saying that they should be spending each and every dollar up to the cap, because I don't think it's wise to do so every season, but Felger's argument does have at least a grain of truth in it.
I may be misunderstanding your post, but the Pats have spend 'to the cap' or within a couple of mill every year. When they are a couple mill under it is for the sake of having a reserve either for transactions late in preseason or in season, that never end up happening but mist be planned for in case they materialize. In the event we have an excess, we consistently use a 'phony' bonus to push it forward.
As far as the budget of real money spent on payroll, that is very different. And it is a tricky issue too. Two teams can use up their full cap with tremendous variance in actual dollar cost. An extreme example would be (I will use 1 player to make it simple, but it can be carried across the entire roster)
Team A pays Player A a 3 year $15mill contract with no sb, and 5 mill per year salary. Cap Cost 5mill actual money cost 5mill
Team B pays Player B with a 3 year contract and 12 mill sb, then 1 mill salary each year. Cap Cost 5mill, actual money cost 13 mll.
Both teams spent 'to the 5mill cap' but team B had a much higher salary actual money expense.
Where it gets tricky is that first, a team that is heavily recruiting big time free agents has a higher salary real money expense. Is that because they are more willing to spend money, or have a less intelligent plan on acquiring players?
Secondly, as the example would indicate, in year 2 and 3, Team A actually has a higher salary expense 5mill to 1mill. And this happens in the NFL. Teams that pay large signing bonusses are less able to spend in subsequent years because they carry forward a large part of the salary expense from one year to the next on the cap.
In the long run, unless a team commits cap suicide, all teams that are spending to the cap (or very close as discussed above) are going to have almost identical salary expense on average.
A team like the Pats will have a steady consistent salary expense while a team like the Redskins will be much more volatile as the portion of the cap that is not real dollars increases and decreases based upon amortized signing bonusses.
