The Dallas Cowboys entered the day with approximately $29 million in salary cap space and unlike if it had happened in July, extending CeeDee Lamb ate up some of that wiggle room going into the 2024 season. Allow a minute to explain the difference.
Lamb has been set to play the season under the fifth-year option. Based on his four-year career exploits to that point, that was worth $17.991 million of base salary. That money was accounted for in the team’s 2024 cap as the money was guaranteed and essentially a one-year deal. Even as Lamb stayed away from OTAs first, and then mandatory minicamp and then the start of training camp, that was still the case.
And when that was the case, any extension Lamb agreed to was going to lower the club’s cap number for the year.
That’s because second contracts for superstar players such as Lamb, contain large signing bonuses that account for (most of the time) almost all of their first-year cash. The original base salary is absorbed into that number. The NFL allows teams to spread out, or amortize, bonuses across five years of salary caps.
So when a player like Lamb signs for close to a $40 million signing bonus, which is what his bonus ($38 million) and new base salary (likely $1 million), his first-year cap hit goes down from $18 million to $8 million.
That would normally be a $10 million bump to the team’s cap space.
But as soon as the Cowboys, in early August, placed Lamb on the Reserved/Did Not Report list, things changed.
Lamb’s salary was no longer on the books because he was officially off the roster. So Dallas, which had around $11 million in cap space at the beginning of training camp, had $29 million in cap space this morning.
So with the agreement, Dallas’ cap space will actually shrink the approximately $8 million that Lamb will count against the cap this season and they have around $21 million left to go into the season with.
Also, even if the Cowboys are forgiving all of Lamb’s almost $4 million in fines accrued during his holdout, fines do not return to a team’s cap so that never figured in any of these calculations.
That is unless they extend quarterback Dak Prescott.