Dead Money Isn't the Villain — Part 2: The Void Year

Following up on Part 1, this piece stays on the dead money beat — but digs into a specific mechanism that most fans haven't heard of: the Void Year. The back half of this one gets a bit more intricate, especially once the Eagles enter the picture, so fair warning upfront.

Quick recap from Part 1:

• When a contract is terminated early, any prorated signing bonus that hasn't yet hit the cap accelerates and lands all at once on the original team
• The result: a player who's no longer on the roster still carrying a cap charge — that's dead money
• J.C. Jackson (LAC) and Randy Gregory (DEN) were let go in year two of five-year deals, generating large dead money figures as those unrecognized prorations came due

With that context set: let's talk about Void Years.

1. What Is a Void Year?

1.1. Odell Beckham Jr. (BAL) — The Worked Example

To explain the Void Year, I'll walk through OBJ's contract with the Ravens. He signed for one year at $15M this offseason — $3M in incentives on top, but ignore those for now. The full $15M is guaranteed, structured as $1.17M in base salary (close to the league minimum) and $13.3M in signing bonus.

OBJ's contract with the Ravens:

1.2. One-Year Deal = Full Cap Hit This Year? Not Necessarily

So: what's OBJ's 2023 cap number?

As established in Part 1, a signing bonus can be spread across a contract for up to five years. But intuitively, a one-year deal should mean there's no room to split anything — the whole $15M should hit 2023, right?

Wrong. OBJ's actual 2023 cap hit is $3.9M. The mechanism making that possible is today's subject: the Void Year.

OBJ's $3.9M cap hit confirmed:

1.3. Void Year: Adding Phantom Contract Years to Enable Proration

Here's what the Ravens actually did. Instead of a straightforward one-year deal, they structured it as:

"A 5-year contract from 2023–2027…
…with an automatic termination clause that voids everything after 2023."

A five-year contract that's contractually set to end after year one.

The accounting effect: since the contract is nominally five years long, the signing bonus can be spread across all five years. That's how a $15M deal generates a $3.9M cap hit. The contract spans 2023–2027 on paper — but the "2024 through 2027" portion is void from the start. Hence: void years.

1.4. What Happens When 2024 Arrives?

Simple: the contract voids, which is mechanically identical to cutting a player after one year of a five-year deal — same as J.C. Jackson last week.

Dead money results. And because the rule is "signing bonus can only be spread while the player is on the roster," the remaining $11M in unrecognized proration (covering 2024–2027) accelerates and hits BAL's 2024 cap all at once.

There's one escape hatch: extend OBJ's contract before the void triggers. The cash is already paid — nothing comes back — but if he stays on the roster, the proration continues to spread normally and no dead money is generated.

1.5. Does Void Year Dead Money Actually Cost Anything?

OBJ's void is going to land $11M in dead money on the Ravens' 2024 cap — and by conventional wisdom, that sounds bad.

But here's the important distinction: unlike a release, void year dead money doesn't come from a deal gone wrong. The contract ran its course. $15M was agreed upon, $15M was paid.

The math doesn't change based on whether or not a void clause was used. The only thing that changes is when that $15M hits the cap:

• No void: $15M in 2023
• With void: $3.9M in 2023, $11.1M in 2024

Same total cost. Same player, same performance, same outcome. Void year dead money is cap timing, not an actual financial loss. It's entirely unlike the kind of dead money generated by early releases or failed contracts — where a team is paying for a player who didn't deliver and losing future optionality. Lumping both under "dead money" (with its implicit "wasted money" connotation) is part of why I don't love the term.

1.6. (Advanced) Void Years With Option Bonuses and Restructures

The most common use case is "use a void year to prorate a signing bonus across five years on a deal shorter than five years." But void years aren't limited to signing bonuses. They can be layered on top of two other common cap-deferral tools:

1. Option Bonus: A lump-sum payment in a specific contract year that, like a signing bonus, can be spread across multiple future years for cap purposes. Standard in most modern big-money deals (touched on this in the Rodgers piece).
2. Restructure: Mid-contract conversion of base salary into signing bonus to push cap hits forward. The Saints' signature move.

In both cases, if fewer than five years remain on the deal, adding void years allows teams to maximize the proration window and push as much cap charge as possible into future seasons.

2. Void Years in Practice: The Eagles

2.1. Howie Roseman, Cap Alchemist

Across the league, void years are understood as one thing: a deferred cap tool. They're mainstream now — even traditionally conservative cap operators like the Patriots and Bengals have started mixing them in. But nobody runs the void year playbook as aggressively as the Philadelphia Eagles, under GM Howie Roseman.

(Personal take: Roseman is my No. 2 GM in the league. KC's Brett Veach edges him overall, but on trades and cap creativity specifically, nobody does it better.)

Eagles' void year total vs. the rest of the league:

The gap is staggering — nearly $40M ahead of the second-place Saints. And here's a fact that I'd guess 99% of NFL fans are unaware of, but as a Saints fan I track closely: the most cap-deferred team in the NFL is not New Orleans. It's Philadelphia.

The Saints get the reputation because they restructure loudly and repeatedly throughout the year, generating headlines every March. The Eagles tend to bake their deferrals into contracts at signing — often pushing three-year deals into five-year windows — so there's no annual blitz of restructure news. The operation is quieter. The scale is larger.

Eagles' dead money breakdown showing Void Year dominance:

2.2. Philadelphia's Dead Money Is Mostly Void Year Settlements

As noted in Part 1, the Eagles carry massive dead money numbers. $64M (30% of their cap) in their 2022 Super Bowl season. $57M (25%) through the 5-0 start in 2023. The team is empirically disproving the "dead money = losing" theory in real time.

Look at what actually makes up that dead money:

• Fletcher Cox — $15M (released to restructure contract, re-signed as FA two days later)
• Javon Hargrave — $12M (contract expired, signed with SF)
• Brandon Brooks — $9.8M (retirement)
• Isaac Seumalo — $7.5M (contract expired, signed with PIT)
• James Bradberry — $4.9M (contract expired, re-signed in Philly)

The critical detail: every one of these players either finished their contract naturally or is still on the team. Philadelphia attaches void years to nearly every contract they write. The result is that every time a player's deal concludes — even in good standing — the deferred proration from those void years comes due as dead money.

In other words: almost none of this is the "bad" dead money from blown contracts and early cuts (the only meaningful exception being Jalen Reagor). The vast majority is planned dead money — proration the Eagles knew was coming from the moment those contracts were signed, and which doesn't disrupt roster-building at all. That's a key part of how they've stayed consistently competitive.

(The separate question of whether chronically deferring cap obligations is sustainable long-term is worth asking — it's a real risk. The Saints are probably the cautionary tale here. Maybe a future article.)

The dead money is, overwhelmingly, "by design"

2.3. Doesn't Dead Money Constrain Free Agent Spending?

The obvious counterargument: "If 25% of your cap is already spoken for as dead money, you only have 75% of your actual cap to work with — doesn't that limit what you can do in free agency?"

For the Eagles specifically: not really. Because when the current year's dead money eats into available cap space, they create more room by setting new void years and pushing fresh obligations further into the future.

The numbers make this concrete. AJ Brown's four-year, $100M deal ($25M average) carries a $8.6M cap hit this year. James Bradberry's three-year, $38M deal ($12.7M average) carries a $3.0M cap hit. Stack enough of those structures and the actual usable cap in any given year is comparable to what any other team has — regardless of what the dead money figure looks like in the headlines.

The strategy, in plain terms: kicking the can down the road, perpetually. It works as long as nothing disrupts the cash flow — unexpected major expenses, a significant talent decline that makes deferred obligations look bad in hindsight, etc.

(Imperfect analogy, but: it's like someone who's constantly drawing advances on their paycheck to keep monthly expenses flat. Sustainable until it isn't.)

Eagles' cap management showing the perpetual deferral loop:

2.4. (Sidebar) Why Are the Eagles So Good?

Even with this cap model, you never end up with a genuine windfall — no FA splurges, no locking up everyone long-term. So how do they stay this competitive?

The other half of the Roseman formula: accumulating high draft capital and hitting on those picks (rookies being cheap on four-year slotted contracts).

After the 2020 debacle (4-11-1), the Eagles leveraged the Carson Wentz trade to Indianapolis and a top-6 trade-down to collect two extra first rounders for 2022, then traded and packaged those picks to maintain a steady stream of early selections in subsequent years. Layer in smart mid-round grabs — CJ Gardner-Johnson, D'Andre Swift types — and you've got a roster being continuously refreshed through the draft while the cap is being stretched to fund it. Complete cap overextension, offset by above-average draft positioning. That's the Roseman model.

Eagles' draft capital accumulation strategy:

Jalen Hurts' upcoming extension, the inevitable age curve on key players, and declining draft capital going forward all suggest this particular equilibrium won't hold forever — my guess is 2025 is roughly when things start shifting. Though knowing Roseman, they'll somehow be 11-6 in 2026 anyway and I'll have to write a different article.

3. Takeaways: Good Dead Money vs. Bad Dead Money

Apologies for accidentally turning this into an Eagles fan piece — but the point it illustrates is real:

• Dead money doesn't only come from trades and releases. A large share of what gets reported as "dead money" is void year proration working as designed
• Because of this, raw dead money figures are a poor proxy for how constrained a team actually is (high dead money ≠ bad offseason ahead — see: Philadelphia)
• The most cap-deferred organization in the NFL is not New Orleans. It's the Eagles

The visualization below captures it best: dead money and playoff appearance rate have essentially no correlation across the league, except at very high dead money levels — and even that outlier group is probably driven by teams that generated dead money by cutting a franchise QB, not by Void Year deferrals.

Dead money vs. playoff rate correlation:

Every offseason, "dead money rankings" and "cap space rankings" circulate widely and fuel a lot of debate. But both are lagging, surface-level indicators of something more complex underneath. Teams operate on five- and ten-year planning horizons; deals that look like mistakes often vindicate themselves, and vice versa. Looking at whether a roster is being built with coherent intent — whether the right positions are being invested in, whether the draft and FA moves form a consistent philosophy — will tell you more than any single cap metric.

Thanks for reading a complicated one.

4. Further Reading