Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane told Kim and Terry Pegula that it would take a couple years to reshape the roster and salary cap to the way it should be when he was hired to run the personnel department. Look ahead to the 2019 salary cap space available and you can see the fruits of those labors.
The Bills have shed a few massive contracts over the last two seasons, in many cases gaining assets in the process. But a lot of the corresponding cap hits have come in 2017 and 2018. The dead money on the deals - the remaining signing bonus money that hadn’t yet been accounted for in the salary cap structure - is all accelerated when the player is released or retires. In 2018, that number is almost 47 million dollars. It’s $20 million more than the next team on the list!
But in fitting with the vision for the team, with Josh Allen in place this year to learn the ropes, Buffalo will hit the ground with a ton of cap space in 2019 to surround their young quarterback with established talent. That dead cap money will all be gone.
With the yoke of dead money off the cap, Buffalo has a whopping $76 million in salary cap space for 2019, second-most in the league.
The Bills only have 51 players under contract, though, so they will need to add pieces. Kyle Williams, Kelvin Benjamin, Lorenzo Alexander and a host of other player contracts will expire between now and then. But with financial resources to add talent to replace or re-sign them, the Bills are primed for this roster to look exactly how they want in 2019.