The NFL is taking away millions of dollars in cap space from the Cowboys and Redskins for violations of league rules during the uncapped 2010 season, and the penalty is going to have major impacts on what those two clubs can do in 2012.
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the NFL will be penalizing both teams for dumping salaries into the uncapped 2010 season after being warned repeatedly by the league not to do so (including warnings that there would be “serious consequences” to teams that violated the policy). The Cowboys will lose $10 million in cap space while the Redskins will lose an astronomical $36 million in cap space.
The cap space will be distributed to 28 of the other 30 NFL teams (the Saints and Raiders will not receive an allocation, presumably due to their contract structures in 2010). The Redskins and Cowboys will be able to split up the cap hit between the 2012 and 2013 season in whatever manner they elect, but it is a significant hit no matter how they slice it.
With the salary cap at a $120.6 million, a $36 million hit (even allocated over two years) amounts to a 15 percent reduction in the salary cap for Washington. For a team that just put together a blockbuster trade to select Robert Griffin III with the number two pick in next month’s NFL draft, this penalty severely limits their ability to put talent around him in his first two years.
The league apparently took so long to determine the 2012 cap number partly because they were struggling with how to deal with the cap violations by Washington and Dallas.
And with both of these teams in the NFC East, the big winners may well be the rest of the division. The Giants are struggling to keep their Super Bowl club intact while bumping up against the salary cap themselves, which could ultimately help the Eagles find their way to the playoffs next season as the rest of the division could be getting weaker.
