The phase “if you don’t use it, you lose it” does not apply to the NFL’s salary cap. Quite the contrary. Part of the league strategy for teams each and every year is to budget leftover salary cap space and roll that dollar amount over into the following year — so while each team starts at the same baseline for annual spending power, the individual team cash commitments vary from year to year to allow for making the most of cap space.
Where teams sit against the cap is usually proportionate to where they are as contenders: teams that are on the fringe of competing will exist closer to the salary cap as they spend more looking for the right pieces to push them over the top. All of this illustrates why Miami’s cap strategy to kickstart their rebuild was so important — one year of excessive surplus can set a team up for several years of carryover to help them spend above the average limits of your contending NFL teams.
And that’s what we’re seeing for the Dolphins in 2021. No, the team doesn’t have a ton of cap space relative to the top teams in the league. But they’re comfortably above the cap despite all the money the team handed out in 2020 — thanks in part to their cap carryover.
The NFLPA graphic below ranks the Dolphins 9th in the NFL for cap carryover going into 2021.
A look at the salary cap carryover for 2021: pic.twitter.com/Q5JELBem2u
— NFLPA (@NFLPA) February 19, 2021
The average dollar amount carried over is just short of $10M per team, meaning Miami is comfortably above average in this regard as well. How the team chooses to do business from here is critical for the sustained success of the team’s cap flexibility. Miami, like all teams, needs to be comfortable spending money. But spending money and acquiring talent without boxing themselves in to kick guarantees down the road and subsequently absorbing disproportionate amounts of cap into underachievers and dead money for players cut from the team is the misstep the team did not avoid in their past regimes.
So far, so good this time around. But this offseason will be telling.