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It’s tough to field a competitive roster when over 23% of your salary cap commitments are going to players not on the roster, but the New Orleans Saints have done it anyway. They’re right in the thick of the NFC playoff picture with a 5-4 record, coming off of two extremely tight losses, and there isn’t a team in the NFL eager to suit up against them.
But who is all of that money going to? And why?
Dead money is the salary cap dollars left over from previous contracts. Whenever a player signs a deal with a signing bonus or partially guaranteed salary and ultimately gets released, traded, or chooses to retire, some of those contract guarantees are left behind. These aren’t new checks the Saints have to sign and cut each week — these bills have already been paid, but for accounting purposes they’re left on the books until the contract as written has expired.
But some players currently under contract are technically still counting towards that dead money total, because they were released and returned on a new deal. Fullback Alex Armah Jr. is a good example — his initial Saints contract, signed early in the offseason, carried $234,000 in partially-guaranteed salary and $137,500 in its signing bonus when the team cut him in August. But he returned to the practice squad a few days later and was then signed to the 53-man roster, so the Saints ended up paying him twice (even if the total amount is negligible).
This is the closest the Saints have been to “salary cap hell” in some time, but it’s only temporary. They’re already on the hook for more than $12.4 million in 2022 and almost all of that is tied up in their final cap hit for Drew Brees ($11.5 million), with another $850,000 accounting for Latavius Murray’s terminated contract. A handful of rookie contracts that had small signing bonuses make up the rest. That number will change in the offseason once the team begins to make cap cuts and potentially offload veteran contracts (trading Michael Thomas, for example, would leave at least $8.9 million on the books if done after June 1, 2022) but we shouldn’t see anything quite this distract again for some time.
Four other NFL teams currently have more resources tied up in dead money than the Saints right now: the 7-3 Los Angeles Rams ($45.5 million), the 5-5 Carolina Panthers ($50.5 million), this week’s opponent, the 4-6 Philadelphia Eagles ($62 million), and the 0-8-1 Detroit Lions ($63.1 million). Here is the full list of 58 contracts currently accounting for $42,948,318 against the Saints salary cap: