Cleveland Browns: Why Jarvis Landry might remain with team in 2022
Why the 2022 free-agent market will be so expensive
$15.1 million dollars is a lot of money, but it won’t buy as much in 2022 as you think. Because the salary cap allowance is tied to NFL revenues, Covid-19 paralyzed league revenues, and the cap allowance, which had been growing at a steady rate of about 5-6 percent per year, actually shrank from $198.2 million in 2020 and then to $182.5 million in 2021, a drop of 7.9 percent.
Hence, there was suddenly a league-wide shortage of cap space and many NFL free agents wound up signing for half price. Last year was a great year to sign free agents like Jadeveon Clowney who would normally not be available for a one-year deal. This year, however, NFL revenues are back with a vengeance and the cap allowance is projected to grow from $182.5 million to $208.2 million.
That’s a 14.1 percent growth rate versus the normal 5-6 percent. This starve/binge cycle means that the NFL teams are going to have well over twice as much free-agent dollars to spend this year. That means free agent prices are going through the roof this season.
Overthecap.com has a number that they call effective cap space. It’s not the actual amount that the team is going to spend in the off-season. In fact, this writer is tired of damping down expectations for the Browns to spend millions and millions on free agents every year based on the fantastic war chest that they had accumulated in the Sashi Brown years.
The total cap space is like a bank account. Teams typically don’t spend it to zero unless they think they are going to win the Super Bowl in that particular season.
Moreover, the number does not include any budget for signing draft picks or mid-season replacements. The team is planning to draft college players, right? And you do realize that there will be injuries, so new players have to be signed throughout the season? S
o the cap space number has to allow around $10 million at least to cover those expenses. Nevertheless, there are seven teams that are toting around $40 million dollars or more of effective cap space. There has never been this amount of money available for free agents before, and it’s going to reset the payscale dramatically.
This author was in Sapporo, Japan when the USS Enterprise was put into port for the first time in 40 years. What do you suppose happened to the price of beer that weekend? Well, now you understand what’s going to happen to the price of a decent wid receiver in the 2022 offseason.
Despite Jarvis Landry’s bad year this year, he doesn’t seem to have any permanent impairment. At age 30, he will probably bounce back in 2022. An above-average receiver will be worth a multiyear contract this off-season. To replace him with an 800-yard receiver of about the same age as Landry, get out the Haslam’s checkbook and be set to write a check for a four-year deal for $50 million dollars or so. It’s totally not going to be worth it.
Salary inflation is made worse this year due to legalized crooked accounting techniques pioneered by the New Orleans Saints, among others, who figured out how to stash guaranteed bonus money in “voidable years” in the future. The concept is to pay a bonus in future years, but not have any salary money attached to those years.
The NFL approved this questionable practice to help teams maneuver out of difficult salary cap situations, but they have basically given teams an additional credit card for play-now-pay-later. Now they have this credit card, plus they have huge budgets this year. They can afford insane salaries.
Eventually, these “voidable years” are going to start to weigh down the cap for different teams. It’s kind of like the National Debt. They can’t do this forever, so at some point, the NFL will have to step in and change the rules to save teams from their own foolishness, but in the meantime, they are going to jack up player salaries to new levels.
The net takeaway is that $15.1 million may not seem like that much by the end of the offseason. If Landry wants to stay in Cleveland, Browns GM Andrew Berry can offer Landry and his agents (Rich Paul and Damarius Bilbo of Klutch Sports) some guarantees in exchange for reducing the cap figure by a few million dollars. That would be a win-win.
Because Landry’s deal has only one more year left on it, the downside risk in case of injury is much smaller than if they go out and sign some mediocre free agent to a five-year deal with substantial guarantees and then find out he gets injured.
If the Browns finish the deal with Landry, when he finally leaves in 2023, they qualify for a compensatory draft pick as long as there are more free agents leaving Cleveland than arriving. Fans, aren’t you sick of the Ravens having two and three more draft picks than the Browns almost every single year?
The reason is that they make sure they qualify for compensatory draft picks. The next page discusses how the Browns can get a draft pick, possibly a fourth-rounder if they have the discipline to not cut Landry.