Dolphins Salary Cap

Rule of 51 — In the offseason, the only base salaries or tenders that count against the team salary cap are those of the players with the 51 highest cap numbers on the team.

 

LTBE - Likely To Be Earned

NLTBE - Not Likely To Be Earned

Salary cap bonuses are categorized under one of the two headings. If such a incentive is labeled LTBE, that money will count against the team’s cap. If it is an NLTBE incentive, then the cap will not be affected by the payment. When a team inserts large NLTBE incentives into its contracts, the salary figures are inflated, but much of the money is never doled out. If the incentives were to be received, the cap would remain unaffected…for that year. The next year, the cap would be shrunk due to an NLTBE payment. This is somewhat rare; however, due to the fact that the incentive was regarded as “not likely to be earned” in the first place. At the same time, if a LTBE incentive is not granted to a player, that team’s cap may be expanded in the next year. Many teams in the NFL "roll over" unpaid incentives from previous years to increase the current years cap space.

While we hope that you find this chart easy to read, tracking all of the information takes a lot of hard work. There is no simple way to grab contract details as they are quite often not released to the press at the time the contracts are signed.

Our capologist, Philter25, tracks everything in much more detail than the chart currently displayed, and we will be adding more functionality and interactivity to the page to do justice to that hard work. If you have any cap related questions in the meantime, please post it here.