Why It Doesn’t Matter What The Cleveland Browns’ Current Salary Cap Space Is

 

What is the salary cap space now held by the Cleveland Browns, and why does it not affect their offseason plans?

People make significantly more of an effort than they should by spending a lot of time on websites like Over The Cap, which show who has the most and the least amount of cap space. Because it is so simple to generate room, it isn’t a very good prediction of how much money a team is likely to spend in the offseason. I’ll discuss what important and how much they can probably spend this off-season in this piece. I’ll start by providing the basic details on the Cleveland Browns’ current salary cap figures.

The current cap space for the team is $17,029,511.

WHAT IS THEIR BUDGET?

I have previously written an OBR VIP article looking at how much the team is likely to spend at each position this offseason. The formula is built up based on how Andrew Berry has operated each season when building his team. Cash is a very stable metric for how the Browns operate as this is the budget that the owner is setting the front office to build and put together the team.

Salary cap management isn’t very much about the salary cap number each player has each season as this is easily manipulated, it is around how much you spend because the money you pay a player will land on the salary cap at some point. For people freaking out about the salary cap and Watson’s contract, it isn’t going to cause them the problems it is cracked up to be. Here is a free read about how Andrew Berry and Jimmy Haslam are working together to manage the salary cap not just now

The more they spend in any particular area means a reduction elsewhere, linebacker is probably the easiest example of this. If they give JOK a contract extension then it will be an increase in the budget which would need to come from less defensive line spending potentially or another area. The salary cap and roster building is all about opportunity cost, nothing is impossible but if you do x then it might result in y not happening.

While the full formula and reasoning is reserved for VIP readers I wanted to share the projection here for you all. The key number is the overall total, the position projections are based purely on what Andrew Berry has done in the past as a guide. The list is built on those currently under contract plus a minimum priced deals to take them up to the expected position totals.