Salary Cap Update

[yuccaneers]

It is one of the main reason the Bucs had nearly 13 million more dollars to spend this season. It is a way of counting excess money in one season, then when the LTBE is not earned it is rolled over into the next season as salary cap space. There are many teams that use it, but not everyone has had the money to be able to do it.

[yuccaneers]

ALL special teams incentives and incentives added DURING the season are classified LTBE. If a LTBE incentive is not reached, the cap is credited by that amount the next season.

Example 2: Team A has $12M in cap room on Sept. 1. That cap room doesn't do anything for the team during the season, and can't be carried over. However, if the team goes back and adds $2M special teams incentive clauses to the contracts of 6 six offensive linemen, something as silly as registering 10 special teams tackles, the team eats up the rest of the cap for that year. Then, when none of those incentives are earned, the team gets a $12M credit towards next year's cap.

What makes a bonus LTBE or UTBE isn't as black-and-white as you would expect: a RB rushing for 1 total yard could be an UTBE bonus, while a FS sacking the QB 10 times is LTBE. (I know what you're thinking… WTF?!) These designations are based on the previous year's performance. If a player performed the feat last year, then the bonus is considered "Likely to be Earned", otherwise it's "Unlikely to be Earned". A good example would be that an incentive for Randy Moss to catch 23 touchdowns next year would be considered LTBE, even though he most likely won't reach that milestone again.

So why would anyone use LTBE bonuses if they're going to count against the cap whether they're met or not? AHA! You've found the loophole: if you have a player with a LTBE bonus and it is not met, you get a credit against next year's cap for the amount of that bonus. For example, if Player X had a salary of $1 million, but also had LTBE incentives in the contract totaling $500,000, his cap hit would be $1.5 million. If he failed to meet those LTBE goals, the team would be allowed an extra $500,000 to spend (above the salary cap) during the following season.

These are clippings from many different sources

[TBayXXXVII]

Thanks.  Good info Yuc.

[STULAAKE]

Great insight as always Yucc...thank you!

[The Q]

It remains to be seen if the BUCS overpaid for Faine. Looking into the future is not an exact science.

[cyberdude557]

What's the cap floor? Dont we need to spend another $8 million?

[dbucfan]

After finding contract numbers for Jeremy Zuttah, Marques Douglas and a few other lower tier players the team has roughly 24,525,208.00 million dollars of cap room.

What - your rounded off the cents?!!!!!!!  Nice job Yuc, as always...

[yuccaneers]

Basically teams in the NFL need to spend 86.4%, forcing teams to spend at least $100 million of the actually $116 million dollar cap. The cap floor for 2007 was 81.75 million, so the floor has gone up by 19.25 million over last season which is why some teams were willing to as some say over pay for average talent to avoid being fined by the league.

So while many have been wondering why so many teams were so willing to over pay there were two reason first the floor going up by almost 19 million and the LTBE loophole that allowed more teams to roll over money.

[yuccaneers]

The team is already pasted there cap floor and still has to sign there draft picks which should still leave them with just over 21 million in cap space which you can be sure Allen will work into contract as the season goes along so he can roll most if not all of the 21 million over to next season.