The Cleveland Browns are in pretty good shape financially. The team currently has an estimated nearly $36 million in salary cap space, which is tops in the league, and that’s thanks to the massive amount of rollover that Cleveland has been saving since 2016. COVID-19 is going to bring massive changes to the league’s 2021 financial situation which will devastate many teams, but the Browns should be able to overcome this hurdle due to smart planning. Let’s take a look at how the pandemic could affect the Browns cap space in 2021 and beyond.
Browns rollover cap surplus will soften future COVID-19 blow
Current salary cap situation
Cleveland ranks 17th in the NFL in active spending at $178 million, leaving them $20 million below the $198 million salary cap. And yet, they have nearly twice that amount in cap space. This is because of the massive purge that former general manager Sashi Brown instituted back in 2016 when he was hired. Brown got rid of many of the team’s veterans, and spent just enough in free agency to meet the league’s spending minimum. The rest of the cap space has been continually rolled over each year, with the ultimate goal of using that extra cash to extend key players (who ended up being Myles Garrett, Baker Mayfield, and Denzel Ward for example) while still being able to improve the team around them.
Too often we see NFL teams spend big money to keep their star players because they feel they’re ready to win a Super Bowl, but end up becoming hamstrung due to those deals, and they miss their championship window because the rest of the roster was necessarily neglected. Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta and company did not want that to happen in Cleveland.
Let’s take a look at the Browns’ salary table for 2020. Information is courtesy of Spotrac and OverTheCap.
Cleveland is on the table for about $12.4 million of dead cap this year after cutting or trading the following players:
- Christian Kirksey
- T.J. Carrie
- Austin Corbett
- Duke Johnson
- Morgan Burnett
- Chris Smith
- Demetrius Harris
- Adarius Taylor
- Antonio Callaway
- Eric Kush
- Genard Avery
It’s never a good thing to have dead cap, but in most of these cases it was necessary. Corbett, Johnson, and Avery were all players who had or were going to have marginal roles at best, and were dealt for draft capital that has already proven to be useful. The rest sans Callaway (who was cut because he failed to stay out of trouble) were released to save cap space.
Here are the team’s 10 highest-paid players for this season:
- Jarvis Landry – $14.55M
- Odell Beckham Jr. – $14.25M
- Sheldon Richardson – $13.66M
- Olivier Vernon – $11.00M
- J.C. Tretter – $9.98M
- Myles Garrett – $9.68M
- Baker Mayfield – $9.00M
- Joel Bitonio – $9.00M
- Denzel Ward – $8.04M
- Jack Conklin – $8.00M
The only other player making more than $3.66 million this season is Chris Hubbard. Players who could be on the chopping block to save space include Terrance Mitchell and Kendall Lamm, but aside from those two, the Browns are not paying out a ton of money, as evidenced by their $38M in space. One of Cleveland’s guardrails is to not pay for depth, and in order for the Browns to save cap space in 2021, they’ll have to adhere to that rule.
Changes for 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the sports world, and the NFL is no different. The league and the Players Association only recently reached an agreement to begin training camp, and with revenue expected to fall significantly in 2020, and because of that, the salary cap just cannot continue to increase the ~$10M it has been for the past seven years. The league originally wanted to lower 2020’s cap by $8M, but that will not end up happening. Instead, the impact of the revenue shortfall will be spread out over a multi-year period as opposed to being inflicted only in 2021, which would have put an astronomical amount of veterans out of work.
The 2021 salary cap floor is reportedly going to be set at $175M, which is a significant decrease from the current $198M, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. It will drastically affect every team, but the Browns should be able to navigate the murky waters because of their rollover. However, that doesn’t mean the team will come out unscathed. Far from it.
Next year is going to be very different money-wise, and some tough decisions are going to have to be made.