Things are starting to make some sense. We've been discussing salary cap, cap floor and cash floor for about a week now and all along most people thought that the NFL had a cash floor of 99% this year and it was applied per team. Sander and I discussed this in the comment section of a few articles and I always left with a question that I couldnt figure out how to answer. That question is this: it's a league-wide cash floor of 99%, not a team floor. The league has to average spending this amount in 2011 and 2012, and then the per-team floor is introduced in 2013.
For a bit more info, check out this quote from a PFT article that explains it a bit better than I do.
The summary of the final deal that we obtained on Monday confirms that, indeed, the "minimum team cash spend" applies on a four-year basis from 2013 through 2016, and from 2017 through 2020. No minimum per-team expenditure applies for 2011 and 2012.
Still, on a league-wide basis, the labor deal requires the NFL to spend 99 percent of the salary cap in cash in 2011 and 2012.
So what happens if too many teams spend so little that the league isn’t able to average 99 percent of the cap in actual cash spent? NFL general counsel Jeff Pash, via NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, explained Friday night that the league would be required to pay the difference to the players.
This makes more sense. And while I'll probably regret doing this, I can point out the anti-Tampa media bias while also stoking the flames of the "cheap" argument.
The more relevant point, for the next two years, is that teams like the Bucs, Bengals, and Chiefs can choose to stay as far below the salary cap as they want.
I'll leave you with this thought that I've been hammering on for a few days. The Bucs have offered high profile free agents over the year. Offering up record contracts, or at the minimum, better offers (financially) than other teams does not make you cheap. Once the offer leaves your hands, it's on the player and agent to accept. If they don't it's not because you're cheap but because they chose to go elsewhere. Remember on Haynesworth, we out-offered every team with a huge deal, and it was turned down. That didn't make us cheap, just fortunate in a bizarre way.
One key point to remember is that for the Bucs, it doesn't really matter. As discussed earlier, the Bucs could already have met the salary floor if they needed to.