How NFL void years work & why they have the Cowboys so far behind the curve

KRLD-FM / 105.3 The Fan

K&C do a deep dive into the intricacies of NFL contracts and the salary cap, specifically how void years work on contracts and why they're keeping the Cowboys behind the rest of the NFL when it comes to team building.

Transcript

00:00A few people sent this to me, and I think it did come out yesterday, Spotrak has, my

00:21homes is 55 by the way, oh, okay, well, then if you're at 55, I think you could be just

00:26fine. Spotrak put out the list of teams going into 2025 kind of sorted out by void cap,

00:35so how much dead money they're going to have off of void years next year. Philadelphia,

00:41New York Jets, Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Carolina, Minnesota, Cleveland, Jacksonville,

00:46Dallas, those are the top 10 in the league. Two of those teams made the playoffs. Really?

00:52So two of the top 10 in the most voided money made the playoffs, and so that's why I wanted

00:57to bring that up. And if you're asking to start, and this is very fair, what exactly

01:03is a void year? So we've talked about this a lot, and it's an interesting phenomenon

01:08that feels fairly new. I don't know how many years it's been going on. We're essentially

01:15like Dak Prescott is a great example. We all know that Dak Prescott signed a four year

01:20$240 million deal, right? But there are also four more void years on his contract. So technically

01:29his contract is like kind of eight years for 240 million, but all of those years they don't

01:34plan on actually having that player contracted. They're just using that so they have more

01:40room to spread out the money. I don't know who came up with this, but it is very clever.

01:45There's no like particular start date on this either. I just was going to say if there is,

01:50I don't know what it is, but one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this so much is people

01:56keep asking deferred money. No, the play that is actually different. The player still gets

02:03the money on schedule. You are just able to use these fake void years as a place to spread

02:10out the rest of the money against the cap. Dallas loves to do this, and that's a huge

02:17problem because the way they do it, the bills do too. Actually, the bills aren't that bad

02:22at this, this next coming year. So the bills in Detroit both only have $5.7 million of

02:29void money, Kansas city, $1.8 million. So you see that at least for the upcoming season,

02:36they haven't gone heavy into this, but the one outlier is Philadelphia. So Philadelphia

02:43is at the top of the list for voided money, $26.2 million. That means that next year they

02:50already have $26 million of their cap wiped out. Whereas next year, the Cowboys have $12.7

02:56million of their cap wiped out. But the question that comes up time and time and time again,

03:03how does Philadelphia keep signing these players? Yes. How do they have money and the Cowboys have

03:09no money?

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