Despite the heavy lifting of the Miami Dolphins’ salary cap reset having come and gone, the Dolphins are still showing some pretty heavy wear and tear on the salary cap from the sins of the Mike Tannenbaum era. The Dolphins were routinely restructuring contracts and deferring guaranteed money under Tannenbaum to manipulate the salary cap and create space to bring on stop-gap players in an effort to elevate the team into contention.
As we all know those efforts didn’t work out too well for the Miami Dolphins, who had to conduct an abrupt about-face and tear the whole thing down. Miami paid the price dearly in 2019, seeing $66.9M in salary cap space being burned up by players who were no longer on the team.
The good news? That number is greatly reduced in 2020. The bad news? It is still one of the five worst figures in all of football. The Dolphins current boast $23,273,859 in dead cap for the 2020 season — dollars that count against the salary cap for previously paid guarantees to players who are no longer on the roster.
Ouch.
Where does that dollar figure come from? Who is responsible?
SAF Reshad Jones – $10.1M dead cap
Let this serve as the final reminder of what Tannenbaum’s strategy did to the Dolphins’ cap situation. Jones signed a 4-year, $48M extension with the Dolphins in 2017 before falling out of favor with Adam Gase in 2018 and missing the majority of the 2019 season. One year after Jones’ contract was signed, the Dolphins restructured it in the 2018 offseason — freeing up $6.6M in cap space that would need to be paid off eventually.
The Dolphins are paying for it now, with Jones incurring an 8-figure cap hit to not be a member of the team anymore.
SAF Minkah Fitzpatrick – $5M in dead cap
The Dolphins would probably still love to have Minkah Fitzpatrick in the picture, but Fitzpatrick had other plans. Ironically enough, all of Fitzpatrick’s complaints about Miami’s usage of him on the field are now things he’s expressing he wishes the Steelers would do more with him. Funny how that works.
So be it. The Dolphins will take responsibility for the rest of Fitzpatrick’s signing bonus this season and then he will be off the books for good.
LB Kiko Alonso — $2.2M in dead cap
Alonso was traded ahead of the 2019 season for LB Vince Biegel in a straight up swap with the Saints after reportedly falling out of favor with the new coaching staff for freelancing too much on plays. Miami ate some of his remaining cap commitments last season and they will absorb the rest of it this season.
This isn’t a hard pill to swallow, unlike the previous two talents. Unlike Jones, Alonso isn’t an obscene cap hit for 2020 and, unlike Fitzpatrick, the Dolphins are probably better off talent-wise with Alonso playing elsewhere.
SAF T.J. McDonald — $1.9M in dead cap
This contract never made sense for the Dolphins — ever. Miami signed McDonald to a 1-year contract with the team in 2017. McDonald would be suspended for 8 games to start the season, but that didn’t stop Tannenbaum & company for locking McDonald in on a 4-year extension worth $24M without him ever playing a snap for the team.
McDonald would play two seasons in Miami between 2017 & 2018 (a total of 22 games) and logged 1,491 total snaps over that span. And here the Dolphins are, 11 months to the day after cutting McDonald, looking at losing nearly $2M in cap space for his services over that stretch.
WR Kenny Stills – $1.75M in dead cap
Stills was sent to Houston along with Laremy Tunsil. Given the surprising rise of WR Preston Williams last season to play outside, Stills and his 2020 dead cap is a casualty worth taking in order to continue getting this team younger and better aligned to win in their new-look offense. Stills is a speedy receiver but he hasn’t been overly dynamic as a yards-after-catch threat — so this loss doesn’t hurt the team too bad.
Fortunately, neither does his cap penalty.
DE Charles Harris – $1.5M in dead cap
Harris feels like yet another two-year dead cap hit for the Dolphins, but he’s not — he actually did play for the Dolphins last year. He didn’t play often (429 defensive snaps) and logged a career low in sacks (0.5) despite Miami’s desperate need for pass rush. There are some things worth paying — and any cap hit to get Harris off the roster is money well spent. He’ll go down as one of the bigger draft busts in recent history for the team — earning $8.9M from the Dolphins for just 3.5 sacks over his three years with the team.
