Well, this is a weird one for me. I’m a film guy, not a cap guy. But I always want to learn more. Over on my Patreon, we have an incredibly smart cap nerd on Discord named James Conklin, aka Jimbo. Jimbo came on the Patreon for a Salary Cap Masterclass, and the show was incredible. It lasted nearly 2 hours, but we covered so much good stuff about how the cap works, why Howie Roseman is a genius, and how the Eagles can remain aggressive in 2026.
You can find the show here. The conversation was so good,
I wanted to write about it. This article is an attempt to translate some of that conversation into written form. However, if you want to learn more about Howie Roseman and how the cap works, I highly recommend the episode.
Jimbo isn’t an Eagles writer, so I can’t plug his work. However, he is an awesome musician, so I promised to link his band’s Facebook and YouTube. They are also awesome!
The Cap Goes Up. Always.
The NFL’s salary cap is not fixed. It grows year over year, sometimes dramatically. In 2022, the cap was $208 million. By 2024, it had climbed to $255 million. The 2025 cap sat at $279 million. For 2026, Spotrac projects it at approximately $303 million.
That steady, reliable growth is the foundation of everything Howie Roseman does. The cap rising by roughly $20 to $30 million every single year is the engine that powers his entire philosophy. To understand why, you need to understand the difference between what something costs now and what it will cost later.
After the 2029 season, the NFL’s television deals come up for renegotiation. Given how the media landscape has shifted, the expectation is that those new TV deals will be worth significantly more than the current ones. Jimbo estimated the 2030 salary cap could range from $400 to $500 million. The implications of that number will become clear as we go.
What Actually Counts Against the Cap
Before getting into how Howie manipulates the cap, it helps to know what goes into it. During the regular season, all 53 players on the active roster count against a team’s cap. So do practice squad players and players on injured reserve still count. Crucially, so does dead money: contractually guaranteed payments owed to players who are no longer on the team.
Roseman’s strategy inherently generates dead money. It is a feature, not a bug, but it does mean the Eagles typically carry more dead cap than most other franchises, and the numbers can look alarming if you don’t understand why they’re there.
Three Concepts That Change Everything
There are three concepts that are foundational to understanding how the Eagles operate.
1. Rollover Cap
Any salary cap space that a team does not use in a given year rolls over to the following year. If the Eagles are $10 million under the cap at the end of 2025, they enter 2026 with an extra $10 million in spending room. There are some technical limits to prevent extreme cases, but for all practical purposes, unused cap space carries forward.
2. Cash vs. Cap
The amount of actual money a player receives in their bank account does not have to equal the amount of salary cap space their contract consumes in a given year. These are two separate numbers, and the Eagles exploit that gap more aggressively than any other team in the league.
Howie Roseman routinely pays players enormous lump sums of cash upfront while spreading the resulting cap hit across multiple years. Players get all the money now. The cap feels the impact gradually. It is entirely legal.
3. League Minimum
Every NFL player must receive a base salary that meets the league minimum, which varies by years of experience and currently ranges from $885,000 to $1.3 million. This seems straightforward until you realize that the Eagles structure virtually every contract so that players’ base salaries are exactly at the league minimum. Not a dollar more.
That includes Jalen Hurts. That includes A.J. Brown. It includes everyone from the superstar on a mega-deal down to a reserve tight end. In terms of the weekly game checks players receive over the course of a season, nearly every Eagle is paid the league minimum. Everything else takes a very different form.
How NFL Contracts Actually Work
Signing Bonuses
A signing bonus is a lump sum paid to a player when they sign a new deal. The player receives all that money immediately. But for cap purposes, the team can spread that hit equally across up to five years. So a $10 million signing bonus costs only $2 million per year against the salary cap for five years, while the player has already deposited all $10 million.
Signing bonuses are always guaranteed. Once the money is paid to the player, it is gone. If you cut that player after one year, you have already paid them $10 million. Those remaining four years of $2 million cap hits are going to hit your books regardless. That is dead money.
Option Bonuses
An option bonus works essentially the same way as a signing bonus in terms of proration, but instead of being paid at signing, it is triggered on a specific date. When that date arrives, the player receives a large lump sum, and the team spreads the cap hit across up to five years.
Option bonuses can be guaranteed or not guaranteed. A guaranteed option bonus means the team owes the player that money even if they cut them before the trigger date. If a player is traded, the new team becomes responsible for the money. A non-guaranteed one means the team can escape it by releasing the player before it comes due. The Eagles use guaranteed option bonuses extensively, and this is the mechanism Howie relies on instead of base salary.
Rather than paying a player $10 million in base salary, which hits the cap all at once in the current year, Roseman pays them a $10 million option bonus, which can be spread over five years at $2 million per year. The player gets all the money immediately and loves it. The cap impact is slashed in the current year. And Howie can do this every single year, rolling new option bonuses into the contract year after year.
Void Years
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where a lot of the confusion about Eagles contracts originates. If you want to spread a bonus across five years but a player is only under contract for two years, you have a problem: you do not have five years of contract to spread across. The solution is void years.
Void years are fake years tacked onto the end of a contract purely for accounting purposes. The player is not actually required to be on the team during a void year. There is no base salary. When a player reaches a void year, the contract terminates. They are effectively a free agent.
But those void years exist in the accounting ledger, and they carry prorated portions of bonus money. When the player reaches the void year, and the contract ends, or when they are cut before that point, all remaining bonus money in future years accelerates. It all hits the current year’s cap at once.
This is why you see those enormous dead cap numbers for Eagles players. This is why cutting AJ Brown would cost $72m in dead money. Brown has bonus money spread across future years. Cut him, and all that future money crashes into the current year’s cap.
The Eagles use four void years on virtually every contract. It is the maximum possible. AJ Brown’s contract has four void years. Josh Uche’s contract has four void years. A $150 million deal and a $2 million deal get structured identically. This isn’t just a strategy for Howie anymore. It is an economic philosophy.
The June 1st Rule and Why It Matters
Not all roster moves are treated equally from a cap perspective. The NFL has a June 1st rule that significantly affects how dead cap money is distributed when a player is released or traded.
If you cut or trade a player before June 1st, all future guaranteed money on their contract accelerates to the current year’s cap. If you do it after June 1st, whatever was already on the books for the current year stays in the current year, but all remaining future money accelerates to the following year’s cap instead.
The difference can be enormous. In A.J. Brown’s case, cutting him before June 1st would create $72 million in dead cap against 2026. Trading him would reduce that to about $43 million, because guaranteed but unpaid money transfers to the acquiring team. As a comparison, if he is cut post-6/1, the number is $23M in 2026 and $49M in 2027, compared to $72M in 2026 if pre-6/1 cut (more on this below).
Teams are also permitted to designate two players per year as early post-June 1st cuts. This allows them to release a player in March, freeing him to join free agency at the normal time, while still getting the cap accounting benefit of a post-June 1st cut. The money is split across two years rather than all at once. Critically, this applies only to cuts, not trades. A team cannot designate a player for an early post-June 1st trade.
This is why, if the Eagles were to part ways with A.J. Brown, it almost certainly would not happen before June 1st. The cap cost would be prohibitive. Any trade would need to happen after June 1st, meaning any draft capital acquired would be 2027 picks rather than 2026.
Restructures: The Famous Howie Magic
For years, Howie Roseman was celebrated for his ability to create cap space seemingly out of thin air. The mechanism for this was restructuring. Converting a player’s base salary into a bonus, which can then be prorated across five years, dramatically reduces the current-year cap hit.
Say a player has an $11 million base salary. You leave the league minimum in place (call it $1 million, and convert the remaining $10 million into a bonus). That $10 million gets spread over five years at $2 million per year. The player’s cap hit for the current year drops from $11 million to $3 million ($1 million base salary plus $2 million of the prorated bonus). You have created $8 million in space.
Players always accept restructures, not because they are doing the team a favor, but because they receive the entire $10 million immediately in a lump sum. They are not waiting for installments. The player gets more money now, the team gets cap space now, and the future years absorb the hit. It is in everyone’s short-term interest.
So why does Howie restructure less than he used to? Because he no longer needs to. In his earlier years as GM, he gave players base salaries, then converted them to bonuses when he needed space. Now, he simply never gives players meaningful base salaries to begin with. Everyone is already at league minimum. There is nothing to restructure. The foundation of every contract is already structured for maximum cap flexibility.
Howie’s Philosophy: Kicking the Can Down the Road
Now that the mechanisms are established, the philosophy becomes clear. Howie Roseman’s entire approach rests on a simple insight. A dollar of cap space today is worth more than a dollar of cap space in the future, because the cap keeps growing. If you push a $10 million cap hit three years into the future, it will represent a smaller percentage of the cap in that future year than it would today. It’s inflation!
Combined with the rollover rule, this creates a powerful incentive to never pay the bills early. If you create $20 million of extra cap space this year by pushing costs into the future, and you don’t spend it, it rolls over. You have not wasted it. But if you ever need it, you have the flexibility to act. Teams that refuse to push costs forward are trading optionality for principle, and they often pay for it when a crisis strikes.
The cash spending numbers illustrate how extreme this has gotten. In 2019, the Eagles paid out $370 million in actual cash to players despite operating under a $188 million salary cap. They nearly doubled the cap in real-money terms by paying future obligations in the present. In 2022, they did it again: $371 million in cash against a $208 million cap. Projected for 2026, the Eagles are expected to lead the league in cash spending at $302 million, even as their on-paper cap situation looks tight.
This is not cheating. It is entirely legal. But it does allow the Eagles to field a roster that, by any cash measure, is more expensive than the salary cap alone would suggest. They are buying a better team. The delayed bill is the price of that advantage.
Why Don’t Other Teams Do This?
It is a fair question, and we had a long debate about this on the show. The honest answer is that some teams do, just not to the same degree. The Eagles are in a different stratosphere when it comes to void year usage and deferred cap hits.
The first barrier to other teams is financial. Paying enormous lump-sum option bonuses to players requires the owner to have significant cash available right now. Many NFL owners are extraordinarily wealthy on paper but do not have tens or hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in liquid accounts. They are wealthy through investments, real estate, and equity stakes that cannot easily be converted on short notice. Paying a player $20 million in an option bonus at the start of March, before a single dollar in ticket revenue has come in, requires cash-on-hand that some owners genuinely do not have.
The second barrier is trust. When a general manager defers massive cap obligations into future years, the owner is essentially betting that the GM will not be reckless, that the team will not become the next New Orleans Saints, trapped in an endless cycle of dead money and cap hell, unable to shed aging veterans because the accelerated dead cap would crush them. That kind of trust is rare. Most owners are understandably reluctant to hand a GM the keys to a strategy that, if mismanaged, could shackle the franchise for a decade.
And that brings us to what makes the Eagles’ situation genuinely unique. Howie Roseman has been with the organization since 2000. He was hired as a salary cap analyst. He did not arrive as a high-profile outside hire promising to transform the franchise. He grew up inside this organization, learned under its ownership, and has worked alongside Jeffrey Lurie for over two decades.
That history matters. Lurie’s willingness to let Roseman operate this aggressively is not just strategic. It is a reflection of a trust that has been earned over decades. If Howie Roseman were the Cincinnati Bengals’ general manager, most people would never have heard of him. The strategy requires an owner who understands it, believes in it, and has the liquidity to fund it.
The 2026 Cap Situation: What It Actually Looks Like
Cap websites show the Eagles with manageable space heading into 2026. But those numbers exclude things that absolutely will exist: projected draft-pick salaries, practice-squad spending, and dead-cap acceleration from players whose void years are approaching. With that included, the Eagles are approximately $6 million over the cap before making a single move.
That is not a crisis, but it is a hole that needs to be filled before anything else can happen. The good news is that there are clear, obvious paths to creating space. Some of them are simple. Some are genuinely ingenious.
The Easy Moves
Cutting Michael Carter II is a straightforward decision. He carries a $9.7 million base salary.
From there, four players on the roster have contracts that allow for restructuring: Jordan Davis, Moro Ojomo, Tyler Steen, and Nolan Smith. Importantly, the idea that Howie can “just move money around” whenever he wants is something of a myth. Because he has structured virtually every contract to already be at the league minimum for base salary, there is almost nothing left to restructure. These four players are the only ones with meaningful base salaries to convert. Everyone else is already as efficient as possible.
What Can The Eagles Do?
Considering the moves above, with $29 million established as a realistic baseline, we tried to work out how much the Eagles could do this offseason. So, let’s get silly.
In this exercise, Howie signs nearly everyone. Jaelan Phillips gets a three-year, $60 million extension. Goedert comes back on a one-year, $14 million deal. Reed Blankenship gets three years at $30 million. Fred Johnson, Adoree’ Jackson, Braden Mann, Marcus Epps, Josh Uche, Brett Toth, Sam Howell, and Ben VanSumeren all return. Jordan Davis gets a three-year, $54 million extension. Several low-cost free agents are added from around the league at low-cost deals. The Eagles even trade for Raiders tight end Michael Mayer and sign eight undrafted free agents.
After all that, the Eagles still have $12.8 million remaining in 2026. However, keep in mind this is without the Eagles adding a high-profile free-agent signing outside the current roster.
That is the Howie Roseman magic in its clearest form. Even in a scenario where the Eagles essentially throw money at every problem simultaneously, the way these contracts are structured keeps the cap hit manageable. The players get paid enormous sums upfront. The cap absorbs tiny fractions of those sums each year. And the team still has wiggle room.
What About 2027 and 2028?
All of those deferred costs have to land somewhere. The Eagles cannot kick the can forever. Right?
Jimbo ran the numbers through 2028, assuming the above 2026 scenario and then stacking on aggressive extensions for the players whose deals will be coming due: Jalen Carter at $40 million per year, Nolan Smith at $25 million per year, Cooper DeJean at $30 million per year, Quinyon Mitchell at $35 million per year. These are substantial projections.
In 2027, after rolling over the $12.8 million from 2026 and paying for those extensions plus all the associated draft picks, practice squad costs, and existing dead cap obligations, the Eagles still have roughly $10.5 million remaining.
In 2028, the exercise finally finds its limit. The projected cap is $352 million, but after all the accumulated obligations from the expensive decisions made in 2026 and 2027, the Eagles come out approximately $17 million over. The bills have arrived.
But this scenario assumes A.J. Brown, Lane Johnson, Saquon Barkley, Jordan Mailata, DeVonta Smith, and Hurts are all still on the roster in 2028, collecting massive checks. It assumes the Eagles made every aggressive move possible and kept nearly everyone. It assumes none of those veterans have retired, none have been traded, and none of those contracts have been restructured again.
The Takeaway: Neither Doomed Nor Unlimited
You will hear from Eagles fans and pundits that there is simply no way the team can extend Jordan Davis and still afford Jalen Carter. You will hear from others that the cap is a fiction and that Howie can do anything. Neither of those things is true.
What Jimbo’s analysis actually shows is that the Eagles are operating with more flexibility than most people assume, but within real constraints. Can they extend Davis, Phillips, Goedert, and Blankenship and still pay enormous contracts to Carter, Mitchell, DeJean, and Nolan Smith? Probably not. But can they do a lot of these moves? Almost certainly.
Can they keep some combination of those veterans while still locking up their young core? With Howie Roseman doing the structuring, the answer is yes to a degree that would surprise most fans.
The Eagles are not the Saints, locked into immovable dead cap commitments to players long past their prime. The structure of their contracts is fundamentally different. Every new deal Howie signs has a minimal base salary, a maximum bonus spread, and four void years. When a player eventually leaves, the dead cap is painful in the short term, but the team has been paying cash above the cap all along, so the accounting pain on paper is often divorced from the actual financial reality.
Final Thoughts
If any of this is wrong, the fault is entirely mine. The original source is the podcast.
What Jimbo delivered was genuinely illuminating to me. The Eagles’ salary cap situation is not a mystery. It is a deliberately constructed, carefully crafted strategy built on an understanding of inflation, optionality, and the long-term trajectory of the NFL’s finances. It requires an owner willing to spend cash now for cap benefits later. It requires a GM who has spent decades mastering its mechanics. And it requires the kind of institutional trust between owner and front office that is genuinely rare in professional sports.
The next time someone tells you the Eagles are in cap hell, ask them if they’ve accounted for void year acceleration, rollover cap, and cash spending over the cap. I’d be interested to hear their response…
