A huge talking point as Commanders fans watched the 2023 season wind down to an end — and as 2024 progressed — was the fact that Washington led the league in projected available salary cap space. Fans and media alike got giddy with the possibilities.
At the beginning of March, after releasing Charles Leno and Logan Thomas, the Commanders had a league-leading estimated cap space of $91.5m.
In the days following the start of free agency, after agreements with several players had been announced, nearly every article written about Commanders cap space was quoting a figure of about $63m in remaining cap space, with OTC and Spotrac both reporting roughly the same number.
Unfortunately, this number simply wasn’t correct.
Both websites work the same way — a player’s contract is entered into the database when the site’s administrators learn the details of the contract. Sometimes this happens quickly, and other times it takes longer. During veteran free agency, players often have to fly across country to sign the new contract, so the official completion of the deal may happen a week or more after it is announced with great fanfare on Twitter.
It has now been two weeks since the start of 2024 veteran free agency, and, until yesterday, neither Spotrac nor OTC had logged enough Commanders free agent player contracts to make it possible for any casual observer to be able to estimate the team’s available cap space.
With almost no reports in the media about cap space in the past 10-12 days, it’s reasonable for most fans who keep up with cap space based on headlines to think that the Commanders still have $63m available. Of course, they don’t.
I’ve made an effort to keep my 7 or 8 Twitter followers up-to-date over these couple of weeks
As I have discussed before, the Commanders will need about $9.2m to sign their 9 draft picks, and they will need roughly $6.5m in ‘contingency’ to sign replacement players during the season as others are injured. There is also another $2.5m in injury benefit previously reported by OTC that will reduce the team’s available cap space.
This means that the current expectation is that Adam Peters will roll over about $28m in unused cap space to 2025. Of course, this number can be further reduced if the team makes any significant free agent player signings that involve more than veteran minimum contract.
This is more available cap space than I projected after the first day or two of free agency
I’m reasonably handy at projecting first-year cap hits for contracts based off of tweeted reports from the likes of Ian Rapoport or Nicki Jhabvala.
Nonetheless, this year, for the first few deals that I guesstimated, my numbers for 2024 cap hits turned out to be consistently high, which surprised me.
Then I found out why. It’s because the Commanders have been adding void years to 3-year contracts.
The Commanders are fully committed to the use of void years
From 2012 to 2019, to the best of my knowledge, the only contract signed by the Redskins that used void years was the one for DeSean Jackson. The reason the team used void years for that contract was that Jackson was cut by Chip Kelly late in the offseason when Washington had spent nearly all of its cap space. The cap manager at the time, Eric Schaffer, added void years to Jackson’s deal to ‘fit it in’ under the cap limit.
2021
The team’s current cap manager, Rob Rogers, was hired by Ron Rivera in 2020, and he soon started using void years in contracts. I wrote an article about the fact that he built in void years to the Curtis Samuel contract in 2021 even though the team wasn’t struggling for cap space like they were when DJax was signed.
2022
In 2022, Rogers increased his use of void years, which I wrote about around this time two years ago.
