Despite the heavy lifting of the Miami Dolphins’ salary cap reset having come and gone, the Dolphins are still showing some pretty heavy wear and tear on the salary cap from the sins of the Mike Tannenbaum era. The Dolphins were routinely restructuring contracts and deferring guaranteed money under Tannenbaum to manipulate the salary cap and create space to bring on stop-gap players in an effort to elevate the team into contention.
As we all know those efforts didn’t work out too well for the Miami Dolphins, who had to conduct an abrupt about-face and tear the whole thing down. Miami paid the price dearly in 2019, seeing $66.9M in salary cap space being burned up by players who were no longer on the team.
The good news? That number is greatly reduced in 2020. The bad news? It is still one of the five worst figures in all of football. The Dolphins current boast $23,273,859 in dead cap for the 2020 season — dollars that count against the salary cap for previously paid guarantees to players who are no longer on the roster.
Ouch.
Where does that dollar figure come from? Who is responsible?
SAF Reshad Jones – $10.1M dead cap
Let this serve as the final reminder of what Tannenbaum’s strategy did to the Dolphins’ cap situation. Jones signed a 4-year, $48M extension with the Dolphins in 2017 before falling out of favor with Adam Gase in 2018 and missing the majority of the 2019 season. One year after Jones’ contract was signed, the Dolphins restructured it in the 2018 offseason — freeing up $6.6M in cap space that would need to be paid off eventually.
The Dolphins are paying for it now, with Jones incurring an 8-figure cap hit to not be a member of the team anymore.