The Miami Dolphins entered the 2020 offseason with one of the highest salary cap spending amounts in all of football. And now, as we leave the 2020 offseason behind and transition into another year of football, the Miami Dolphins will still have one of the highest salary cap spending amounts in all of football.
The NFL and NFLPA ironed out the finer details of how exactly player opt-outs would impact the salary cap both in the here and now but also projecting them forward — and the byproduct is that salaries will be deferred to the future with only a small portion of each player’s hit remaining for 2020. For the Dolphins, the team didn’t necessarily lose any big name players, but seeing WRs Allen Hurns and Albert Wilson elect not to play did help to boost Miami’s spending power.
The Dolphins gave out a slew of big money contracts this offseason, including a mega-deal to CB Byron Jones and several deals that gave out $10M+ annually to the likes of Ereck Flowers, Shaq Lawson and Kyle Van Noy. And yet with the final numbers crunched after COVID-19 opt-outs, the Dolphins currently rank seventh in the NFL in salary cap space with $24,650,560 in room.
The teams ahead of the Dolphins at this point in time?
- Cleveland
- New England
- Washington
- Denver
- New York Jets
- Tennessee
What does this mean for the Dolphins? It probably won’t change much, as the Dolphins will have the opportunity to rollover salary cap space from 2020 to 2021 and help mitigate the impact of a reduced salary cap in the face of revenue sharing losses from a lack of ticket sales this season for the NFL. The 2021 salary cap floor sits at $175M, which would give the Dolphins just under $10.5M in cap space at their disposal. But if the Dolphins are able to roll over some $20M in cap space as surplus from this year’s cap, suddenly Miami has a much more comfortable buffer of around $30M to work with, which can help the team accommodate the incoming rookie class, add a few starters via free agency and potentially sign any outgoing players that the team wants to prioritize, such as LB Raekwon McMillan or DL Davon Godchaux.
