On the team home page where it says "Cap Used Next Year", does that figure include "Dead Cap Next Year", or is it in addition?

Thanks

There is no intersection between the two - "Cap Used Next Year" only refers to players currently on your team and "Dead Cap Next Year" only refers to players no longer on your team.

Dead Cap should be included since that is guaranteed money that will be taken from your cap whether the player is on the team or not.

+1

So, if the Cap next year was $130 M, and I have Cap Used Next Year of $115 M and Dead Cap Next Year of $15 M, in actuality I have NO cap room next year.

Correct?

That would be correct, you will need to probably do some renegotiation to see if you can lower your cap numbers for your current players if you need to sign more or don't have enough room for your draft picks. The cap increases at a rate of 5% per year if you want to know what the cap will be for the next year. If you are in cap trouble you don't have to carry a full 53-man roster, I think the minimum is 47 (might be 46, I don't recall off the top of my head, the warnings will let you know if you're too low) which can become a challenge with injuries but if you need a season to get your dead cap load off that's one way to do it.

I always look at my roster in early FA and sort by "save if release" - starting at the highest value - to see if any of them will renegotiate. The "save if release" is essentially the amount of the cap that they are using that is not guaranteed, so if you were to cut them that's how much the cap would open, but often times those players will take a pay cut especially if their ratings have declined at all. If you have lots of big bonus contracts, then it can be easy to paint yourself into a corner where it may take a few seasons to get your cap stabilized - those big bonuses can increase your chances of landing a player but if you trade them, cut them, or they retire, you may have to pay the piper.

I wasn't able to bring my roster down below 60 before training camp because I was away from my computer for the weekend and forgot to do it before I left.

The AI cut my 1st, 2nd and 3rd round picks, which gave me over $13 M in dead contracts for next season due to their bonuses.

I know it's ultimately my fault, but I don't think this would have happened if we could tell the AI to evaluate based on future ratings instead of current ratings. Sure would be nice if that option were implemented soon.

+1

Noted - there's a lot that touches, not the least of which is the auto draft list, so this will have to be a revision update as it will mess up any leagues in a draft or early FA who have worked their auto list. I'll see if I can get it into 0.3.2 (0.3.1 is feature-locked right now and should be released in the next couple of weeks)

Based off of the math I did this is not correct. I did the math for my team in MFN-26 for next season. http://mfn26.myfootballnow.com/team/17 I traded away some guys with hefty bonuses in order to rebuild with the extra draft pics. I did the math for all my contracts on a spread sheet for next season using salary + bonus for the 2017 season as total cap hit. I then did a sum on all guys that are under contract for my team next season. This number came out to just over 68 mil. My dead cap hit is 39,944060 for next season. That combined number is around 108-109 mil. My team page says I have cap used next year at $108,878,414. Based off of this Cap used next year has to be including your dead cap hit for the next season. So they are not entirely separate based off of my analysis.