GM philosophy + owner constraints will tell
Obviously this is a big offseason for the Joe Schoen-Brian Daboll tandem that was brought in by New York Giants’ owners John Mara and Steve Tisch early in 2022. Fielding one competitive team in three years isn’t going to cut it, so the pressure will be on for them to make the 2025 season a good one.
The problem is, with that season-long Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, they may be tempted to make rash moves. You know, like trading for a 40-year-old future Hall of Fame quarterback, then acquiring four of his former wide receivers, only to have it all blow up.
Seriously, if the Giants are not to go the way of the New York Jets, they have to improve this season while also setting the team up for long-term success. Almost everything Schoen has done suggests that he’s tried to build a winner in what he sees as the right way – letting positional value dictate the sizes of contracts he offers, using free agency moderately to fill holes but mostly avoiding big-ticket items, primarily building through the draft, acquiring only high-character players, and extending star players before their contract year.
It’s an admirable goal. Unfortunately it hasn’t worked, for three reasons:
- The Daniel Jones saga has been discussed to death, but the die was cast for that to always be a messy situation as soon as he took the Giants job and Jones outperformed his history in his first year with Daboll. Schoen had a choice to make, and as the Grail Knight said to Indiana Jones, “He chose…poorly.”
- Schoen’s first two drafts were mostly bad, and only in his third crack did he seem to redeem himself. Hopefully that’s a trend and not a one-year exception, but one data point doesn’t make a trend.
- Building the “right way” doesn’t work anymore in the NFL. That’s what this post is about. The Super Bowl pitted a team with so many players who’ve gotten into trouble you could make a police lineup out of them against a team that spends so much money that they may rename themselves the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Like the Dodgers in the World Series, that second team won the Super Bowl handily. Schoen has to learn from that. The question is, will Mara and Tisch let him? The NFL’s salary cap is supposed to create a level playing field that prevents situations like you have in baseball, where a few teams with lots of money are the only ones with any chance to win a World Series. Still, relative wealth can play a role in the NFL. Every team has the same salary cap to deal with, but cash spent is not limited in the same way that cap space is. With creative accounting, owners can spend as much as they want.
Mara ($500M) and Tisch ($1.6B) together are only the 24th richest NFL owners. That’s a far cry from the $77.4B Rob Walton-led Denver ownership group. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie ($4.4B) is only the 20th-richest, but still, that’s more than twice what Mara and Tisch together have in the piggy bank. It’s not clear whether that has any effect on what Schoen is allowed to do.
Where all this matters is in the accounting tricks that GMs can use to remain cap-compliant while getting money to players up front to induce them to sign contracts and extensions. The most well known trick is the signing bonus, which is completely paid to the player up front as soon as he signs but which for accounting purposes is prorated over the life of the contract (or beyond, by using void years). There are also option bonuses that trigger after contract year 1 but are not necessarily guaranteed. Take for example the fascinating five-year, $255M ($51M average annual value) contract signed last year by Jalen Hurts:
Courtesy of Over The Cap
Through the first two years of the contract, Hurts has cost the Eagles less than $20M total in cap space. The cash flow to Hurts’ bank account is something different, though:
Courtesy of Over The Cap
Hurts has already realized $60M of that contract money, and as of the start of the 2025 NFL year, that will rise to $102M. Player gets paid, team gets a ring, everyone’s happy.
The little detail is that the contract blows up in the later years. In 2029, for example, Hurts’ cap hit will be $97.55M. Again, though, no problem, for two reasons: (1) Those little symbols in the far left column are contract triggers. If I understand correctly, each of them is another option bonus that the team can exercise at that time if it wishes, and if they do, they just allocate the cost of it to the cap through as many as five void years following. So they get to keep kicking the can down the road, never actually seeing a $97.55M cap hit in any year. (2) Over The Cap projects the salary cap to go from $272.5M in 2025 to $314M by 2027, i.e., $41.5M of extra cap space in just two years. By the time they get to 2029, that $97.55M cap hit of Hurts will only be about the same as the increase in cap, i.e., they are paying for Hurts with cheaper dollars.
How much of this type of cap magic Joe Schoen is willing to conjure, or that Mara and Tisch will let him do, is unknown. Maybe he’ll draft Abdul Carter and Jaxson Dart and they’ll become the next Lawrence Taylor and Tom Brady and he won’t have to do any magic to make the Giants a Super Bowl team. Assuming this doesn’t happen, though, he at least has to perform some amount of cap sleight of hand to make the Giants competitive. Over The Cap lets you play with the possibilities, kind of a mock draft for the financial side of things. The Giants are middle-of-the-pack among NFL teams in how much effective cap space (i.e., after signing their draft picks and getting 51 players under contract) they have ($32.1M, circle on left in figure below). They are also middle-of-the-pack in their potential to restructure contracts to increase cap space:
Courtesy of Over The Cap
With “simple restructures” of existing contracts (squares in centers of lines above – converting payments into prorated signing bonuses within the length of the contract, which does not affect the player and thus can be done without consent), they could get up to $51.8M of cap space. The maximum restructure (diamonds in diagram above) they could get would produce $83.9M of cap space. These involve either adding void years or extending the contract, which require the player’s consent.
What Schoen does depends on how hot he feels his seat to be. He has done simple restructures several times during his tenure, and has also done extension restructures, which also have the goal of keeping desired players on the Giants for longer (e.g., Andrew Thomas, Dexter Lawrence). He has only used void years sparingly.
Looking at the rest of the division, the Eagles’ cap space is a little less than the Giants’, but their restructure potential is much less, because Howie Roseman is already performing just about all the cap magic he can (see how close the diamond is to the square). Dallas is already $7M over the cap, but they have about as much potential as the Giants to get to a much better place with restructures.
Washington at first glance looks to be in admirable shape, with lots of cap space and considerable restructure potential. That’s somewhat misleading, though. The Commanders only have 46 players under contract at the moment. That’s because many of the headline free agents they signed last year were to cheap 1-year contracts: Bobby Wagner, Jeremy Chinn, Dante Fowler, Zach Ertz, Cornelius Lucas, Marcus Mariota, Noah Igbinoghene, Clelin Ferrell, none of them more than $6.5M. After reaching the NFC Championship Game, those players may be looking for a more lucrative payday. Even if they were re-signed to the same 1-year contracts that they played under in 2024, that would use up about half of Washington’s cap space. GM Adam Peters was willing to add $18.6M in void year costs to sign the multi-year free agents he brought in. As the chart above shows, he can create significant cap space by extending some of these players if he chooses.
This is the contract situation that Schoen faces over the coming month or so:
Courtesy of Over The Cap
Here are the highlights of what Schoen might consider doing:
- The Giants’ best bets for significant roster cuts are Graham Gano and Rakeem Nunez-Roches, who together would free up $6.765M of cap space.
- He could gain almost $40M by simple restructuring of the Brian Burns, Andrew Thomas, and Dexter Lawrence contracts, and almost another $8M by doing the same with Bobby Okereke and Jon Runyan Jr.
- Extending any of Jermaine Eleumunor, Kayvon Thibodeaux, and Evan Neal would bring $2-4M of extra cap space. Of those, Eluemunor seems the most likely candidate for an extension, if he would agree to one.
That’s more than $50M of cap space Schoen could potentially add on top of the $32M the Giants already have. Plenty of room to sign potential veteran starters at bridge quarterback, defensive tackle, cornerback, and safety, as well as offensive line depth, while also re-signing a few in-house free agents such as Azeez Ojulari and/or Darius Slayton if they can be had at a reasonable price. That would leave quarterback and edge defender as the two positions to target with the No. 3 and 34 picks in the draft, in some order, and the freedom thereafter to target the best player available at any position with the remaining picks.
A lot depends on how much cash Mara and Tisch allow Schoen to spend in 2025. Per Spotrac, the Giants were 28th in cash spending in 2022 ($198M), 9th in 2023 ($267M), and 22nd in 2024 ($267M). Notably, 2023 was the only one of those years in which (as Schoen more or less admits) they were going for it rather than just rebuilding. By comparison, the Eagles spent $329M in 2024, third most in the NFL. At the moment, the Giants are committed to only $151M cash spending in 2025, second lowest in the NFL. By the middle of March, we’ll have a better idea of whether this team is going to be more like the Dodgers or the West Sacramento Athletics in its approach to competing for a title. Maybe if Eli Manning gets a small piece of the franchise, he’ll have some thoughts on that.