Dead cap space is a major handicap for the Bills this season, but it will get better. Here's how (2024)

The Buffalo Bills are dealing with a significant financial handicap this season: dead cap space.

Buffalo has the second highest total of money counting against their salary cap for players who no longer are on the team.

The Bills’ dead cap total is $63.65 million, behind only the Denver Broncos, whose dead cap total is $76.35 million, according to the sports financial website Spotrac. The league-wide salary cap this season is $255.4 million. Thus, dead space accounts for 25% of the Bills’ cap total.

Compare it with some other top contenders.

Reigning Super Bowl champion Kansas City is carrying $11.4 million in dead cap space, fourth-lowest in the league, according to Spotrac. That’s 4.4% of the Chiefs’ cap. Kansas City has 20.5% more of its budget than Buffalo devoted to active players on the roster. It’s a clear advantage.

Cincinnati, expecting to be a contender with quarterback Joe Burrow back from injury, has a league-low $7.4 million in dead cap space. AFC North champion Baltimore has the sixth lowest total, at $17 million. NFC champion San Francisco is ninth lowest at $22 million.

The trade of receiver Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans in April put a $31.09 million dead cap hit on the Bills’ budget this season. That’s bigger than quarterback Josh Allen’s cap hit for this year, which is $30.3 million — ninth-highest in the league among all players who are active for their current team. If the Bills had not decided to throw Diggs overboard, they would be roughly at the league average in dead cap space ($34 million).

But the purging of older veterans also was a big factor. The next six biggest dead cap hits: Tre’Davious White ($6.23 million), Leonard Floyd ($4.37 million), Ryan Bates ($4 million), Micah Hyde ($3.4 million), Mitch Morse ($3 million) and Jordan Poyer ($2 million). Those six add up to $23 million.

“The big hit here is Stef,” general manager Brandon Beane said. “We made a planned effort that if we’re going to do this — if we’re going to move him — let’s go ahead and do it now, take the hit, and it will help clean up some things for future years for us to do some extensions or go back out in the free-agent market, whatever it is.”

Indeed, the Bills are likely to be near the bottom of the dead cap money list next year.

In fact, that’s where they have been in recent years. The Bills had the second lowest dead cap total in 2023, the eighth lowest in 2022 and the third lowest in 2021.

Rk Team Dead cap total

1 Denver Broncos $76.3 million

2 Buffalo Bills $63.6 million

3 Minnesota Vikings $62.3 million

4 Philadelphia Eagles $56.7 million

5 Tampa Bay Bucs $55.9 million

6 L.A. Chargers $54.8 million

7 New York Jets $53.0 million

8 Green Bay Packers $49.7 million

9 Carolina Panthers $47.5 million

10 Tennessee Titans $45.5 million

Can a good team overcome a giant dead cap total? Absolutely.

Last season, Tampa Bay (9-8), the Los Angeles Rams (10-7), Green Bay (9-8) and Philadelphia (11-6) all made the playoffs despite ranking in the top five in dead cap money, all at more than $63 million. In 2022, Philadelphia went 14-3 despite $64 million in dead space. However, the margin for success is thinner with a big dead cap total.

At some point, however, good teams need to get younger.

The Bills had “run it back” with the veterans on the roster in 2022 and ’23, and in doing so, they pushed money forward into future years. Every team does that when it restructures a player’s contract, turning base salary into a bonus, which can be prorated over future years for accounting purposes.

Recall that the Bills had a policy of not spending cash over the cap in the latter years of late owner Ralph C. Wilson Jr.’s tenure. (Teams can spend over the cap in actual cash because they can spread bonus money over time in installments.)

But teams can’t keep pushing money down the road without consequences.

“No doubt,” Beane said. “I would say there’s different ways you can do it. You can keep maxing it up, or you can go ahead and take some of the hit now.”

The Bills could have hung onto players, for instance Morse or Poyer, for another year. But it likely would have involved a restructuring to bring down their cap hit and pushing money into 2025. Morse will be 33 in 2025, Poyer 34. Would they still be on the team?

The Bills currently stand 27th in the NFL in cash spending this year.

Beane agreed that at some point in a team’s development, it must get younger.

“You definitely do, and not only just from a durability standpoint, considering the analytics of the age of your team,” he said. “But also the financial burden of paying those guys versus younger guys. So we need our young guys, our draft picks — and our undrafted guys — to play and help us win.”

Diggs’ dead-cap total of $31 million is a record for a non-quarterback. He wound up costing $4 million more this year in cap space than if he had been on the team. (His cap hit was to be $27 million in 2024.)

That fact speaks loudly to how motivated the Bills’ brain trust was to move him off the roster.

However, in actual cash, the Bills saved about $19 million this season, because they won’t be paying Diggs his base salary. Diggs would have counted $27.3 million against the cap in 2025 if he had been on the roster.

As of now, the Bills currently are pretty tight against the cap, with $1.3 million in available space (that already accounts for a full season of practice squad spending). They may need to create a couple more million in space over the course of the season via some adjustments.

Floyd’s dead-cap total may seem odd because he became a free agent in March and signed with San Francisco. Floyd signed a one-year deal in 2023 with Buffalo, but the contract included void years, which allowed the Bills to spread out his signing bonus. When his contract expired, that amount rolled into the Bills’ cap. Hyde, currently a free agent, also had void years in his contract.

The 2024 total is not the worst dead cap situation the Bills have faced.

When Beane and head coach Sean McDermott rebuilt the roster in 2017 and 2018, they amassed a league-leading $70 million in dead cap space for the ’18 season. That was with a league-wide cap ceiling of $177.2 million, so it took up 39.7% of the Bills cap space, a greater share than this year’s total.

Another big dead-cap year for Buffalo was 2001, when the total was 32.6% of the cap. The Bills were forced to rebuild that year after spending on veterans in a bid to win the last two years of coach Wade Phillips’ tenure.

Denver’s league-leading dead-cap total is largely because of one player. The Broncos released quarterback Russell Wilson, who counts $53 million against their cap. Wilson now is starting for Pittsburgh. Denver released him just two years after signing him to a five-year contract worth $48 million a year.