Miami Dolphins restructure Bradley Chubb clearing $14M in cap

We are getting closer and closer to when the official NFL free agency begins which is Wednesday at 4 PM. Sure, there are tons of backroom deals and illegal/illegal tampering that is going on and we’ll know all about that when deals start to get leaked over the weekend and on Monday.

Teams will be releasing players, shuffling contracts, and restructuring contracts every which way trying to get themselves under the cap or just to give themselves more money to go after big free agents.

One of those team, the Miami Dolphins were $16M over the cap the other day. Then they released Cethan Carter which saved them about $2.5M and now they exercised the 2nd most common way that teams that create cap space with Bradley Chubb.

With the savings from the Bradley Chubb restructuring, the Miami Dolphins are around even with their cap. That’s good going forward and obviously, they aren’t done releasing and restructuring contracts.

What I love is how everyone was so locked in on that over $16M on the Dolphins cap as if they weren’t going to be putting themselves into position to acquire any players in free agency.

Oh, I don’t know maybe, and just hear me out hope you’re sitting down for this, but maybe teams do the same move over and over and over and over again when they want to create cap space using the same wizardry every time. That wizardry that Chris Grier and all the other GMs use isn’t a spell that is located in the Book of Vishanti. It’s a pretty basic concept; they turn yearly salary money on big contracts into guaranteed money.

This is the kind of thing I have to imagine is already known when a player like Bradley Chubb is traded for. Grier knows full well what the cap situation is then and he knows damn well that they are going to restructure that contract. I would also imagine they tell Bradley Chubb that they are going to restructure his contract by giving him more guaranteed money before trading for him.

So when folks like myself say the cap isn’t very real, this is why. Because all you need to do is just give the best players with the biggest contracts more guaranteed money and poof, you have more money to go out and make the team better.

This will continue for the Miami Dolphins and for the rest of the NFL for the next 6 days or so. Buckle up.

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