Bring out your dead

Good article by Cummings on the dead money on the Bucs roster. Dead money is leftover money from players no longer on the Bucs roster which still counts against their salary cap. For example Martin Gramatica counts for $1,797,145 and Brad Johnson counts $4.3 M against the Bucs salary cap. In total the Bucs have $9.6 M in dead money that counts against their cap this year. And if the Bucs cut Steussie he would count $1.6 against their cap this year or next year.

Dead money comes from the signing bonus part of a player's contract. A player's contract has 3 parts: basic yearly pay, signing bonus and incentive money. Teams will frequently give older players big contracts but if you examine those contracts more closely you notice that the money is backloaded into the basic yearly pay. Green Bay did this with Brett Favre a couple of years ago.

The only part of the contract that is guaranteed money is the signing bonus. Which means that if a team cuts a player before the that players contract ends the team still has to pay the signing bonue money. A good GM can either spread out the dead money over a couple of years, or absorb all the dead money in one year. The 49ers went through salary cap hell for a year between Steve Young and Jeff Garcia.

The article has more details on the Bucs dead money numbers this year. On a side note, another fine article by Cummings who continues to put out high quality work.

And yes I've been rambling throughout this post, and yes the picture above is not actually from the bring out your dead scene in Holy Grail.