“
First of all, we need just to function through a season, you need about $10 million in cap going in just for [injured reserve], contingencies; we’re not counting the practice squad yet, and they don’t count the 52nd and 53rd player yet, you only count the top 51,” Licht said. “So with all that stuff, … you need about $10 million just to go into the season.
“You’ve seen us in the past years having no room and then we restructure somebody so we can get $10 million. And then there’s going to be a little extra [in 2024] that we have to count on rolling over for next year because we took $14 million in dead money on Shaq [Barrett] and [Ryan] Jensen this year, but we split it into two years and next year we’ve got to take $29 million. So we still have a big dead money cap hit on those two next year that we purposely did — spread it out only to $14 this year — so that we could do [new contracts for] Mike [Evans] Baker [Mayfield], Lavonte [David], [Antoine] Winfield and Tristan.
“So next year, that’s probably the end of the big [contracts] that we have to do and then we kind of see ourselves getting out of the situation that we put ourselves in intentionally after we won the Super Bowl.”
