So if the Raiders owner couldn't afford to bring him in how have they managed it? I don't understand how the league help them out when the owners are the ones that pay the wages etc.
I'm sure NEP make a lot of money each year so Kraft can afford to spend the money on wages. But I struggle with the idea of Buffalo making enough money for the organization to pay the wages so would make sense for them to have a lower salary??
I'm from London England so I'm used to clubs paying their own way.
NFL clubs pay their own way. However, a team cannot be over the salary cap even if it has all the money in the world in the bank. And on the flip side, a team has to have enough money in the bank to satisfy the escrow requirements on signing bonuses and contract guarantees. If they don't, they can't sign the player.
Unlike the NBA the salary cap is fairly hard and it applies to the team as a whole. There are no player-related salary "slots" that you have to fit things into. All that matters is that the team as a whole is under the cap.
The actual dollars paid to a player and the player's salary cap charge are two separate things (they are related, of course). Two very simple examples:
1) A player is paid a straight salary of $3,000,000 per year for 4 years ($12,000,000 total value). He will be paid $3,000,000 each year and will have a cap charge of $3,000,000 each year.
2) A player is paid a salary of $1,000,000 per year for 4 years and is given a $8,000,000 signing bonus ($12,000,000 total value). He will be paid $9,000,000 in year 1 and $1,000,000 in years 2-4. However, his cap charge will be $3,000,000 per year because the signing bonus is amortized over the life of the contract.
A relatively common thing that teams ask players to do is to let the team convert salary to signing bonus coupled with extending the contract in order to lower the current year's cap charge at the expense of future years'. So the team will pay out more actual cash in the current year but will reduce the cap charge in the current year, though it will increase the cap charge for the subsequent years of the contract.
Say a player is getting paid $10,000,000 per year with 3 years left to go. That's a $10,000,000 cap charge each year. The team might ask the player to extend the contract by two years, lower the salary to $1,000,000 a year for 5 years and give the player a $25,000,000 signing bonus. Under both contracts the player gets $30,000,000 over the remaining life of the contract. Under the restructured contract the player gets $26,000,000 this year and $1,000,000 in years 2-5. However, for cap purposes the player will count $6,000,000 per year. So the restructure lowered the cap hit from $10,000,000 per year to $6,000,000 per year. But in years 4-5 it increased the cap hit from $0 to $6,000,000.
It can get a lot more complicated than that once incentives are involved. Also, when a player is cut or traded the future amortized cap hit due to signing bonuses or guarantees accelerate into the current year. So players can be literally uncuttable no matter how bad they are because the resulting cap charge would totally screw the team.
Also, though we don't often hear about it, there is a salary floor as well as a salary cap.
