Back in 2020, the Cleveland Browns finished 11-5 and won a playoff game despite having the most unused cap space in the NFL. A few short years later, they are staring at a salary cap cliff of their own making, and few options to actually wrap their pocketbooks around it.
Cheap, young talent isn’t found on Cleveland Browns roster
The Browns are almost completely devoid of young talent playing on rookie contracts thanks to a series of trades in 2022 and 2023.
First, the Browns put all their chips in the middle of the table in 2022 when they traded for Houston Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson. Cleveland sent their 2022 first-round pick, 2022 fourth-round pick, 2023 first-round pick, 2023 third-round pick, 2024 first-round pick, 2024 second-round pick, and a 2024 fourth-round pick in exchange for Watson.
After trading away capital for Watson, Cleveland traded out of the second round in 2022 and instead used three third-round picks.
In 2023, the Browns traded their second-round pick for WR Elijah Moore and a third-round pick coming back. (Moore is still on his rookie deal and played more snaps in 2023 than any other Cleveland receiver.)
The core of your team should be picks from the first two days of the draft, but Cleveland didn’t pick in Rounds 1 or 2 in 2022 or 2023. Cleveland’s last two first-round picks (Jedrick Wills, Greg Newsome II) have been good, but they are about to sign lucrative second contracts. The same can be said for their 2021 second-round pick; Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah was the only Browns Pro Bowler on a rookie deal in 2023 and he is a free agent after this season.
The Cleveland Browns have leveraged big-money contracts
Dead cap is the amount of money already paid to a player that hasn’t yet been accounted for in cap space. All the cash will eventually count on the cap, but how it is paid can shift when it’s counted, and when a player leaves the team via retirement, release, or trade, the unpaid money all needs to be accounted for immediately. The Browns have used void years — years beyond the actual length of payment — to spread out the dead cap to the last possible moment, but it creates a crunch when that player inevitably leaves.
After trading for Watson, the Browns gave him the first fully guaranteed five-year contract in NFL history, inking him for $230 million. Cleveland can’t get out of the contract even if they wanted to, as they are on the hook for the remaining $138 million in cash unless they can find a trade partner willing to take on the $46 million per season he is owed. Even if they did that, they have a dead cap number of nearly $63 million from kicking the cap down the road in the contract already.
The Browns have paid $40 million in two seasons to receiver Amari Cooper, who they traded for in 2022, and they pushed out $22.6 million of dead cap hits into the future beyond the end of the deal in 2024. They did the same thing with receiver Jerry Jeudy after they traded for him this offseason, locking him up with a contract extension that featured a bunch of dead money pushed into the future.
Following their trend, the Browns have added void years and dead cap of more than $5 million each to David Njoku, Joel Bitonio, Wyatt Teller, Jedrick Wills, Myles Garrett, Dalvin Tomlinson, Za’Darius Smith, Ogbonnia Okoronkwo, Juan Thornhill, Grant Delpit, and Dustin Hopkins. The Browns are banking on big jumps in the salary cap over the next few years and the ability to extend some of these players to further kick that cap charge down the road.
The 2025 season is a potential powder keg for the Cleveland Browns
With all the money pushed out into the future, the Browns currently sit an estimated $85 million over the 2025 NFL salary cap. As things stand now, they will roll over the $28.8 million in cap space they have in 2024 to drop that number under $60 million.
Nearly $22.6 million of the cap commitment is the dead cap hit for Amari Cooper’s contract expiring. Cooper will be 31 when the 2025 season starts, but if he gets a contract extension, only $7.5 million of that dead cap will count in 2025, but they’ll also probably have to pay him more than $22 million in salary and count that on their cap eventually.
Right now, Cleveland has nine players with over a $19 million cap commitment each in 2025 (including Cooper). Their strategy has been to convert the base salary to signing bonus and spread out the hit, but that just keeps pushing the cap commitment into the future (and further escalating the dead cap numbers). Of those nine players, seven of them will be over 30 by the time 2025 kicks off, so kicking the can further down the road is risky. Players over 30 are more injury-prone than younger players and when those players are released or retire, the bill immediately comes due.
Looking ahead, the Browns rank 31st in projected cap space in 2026, 2027, and 2028 because of their current contractual commitments. In 2028, they don’t have anyone under contract, and it’s all dead cap.
