Buffalo Rumblings
This week, the Green Bay Packers completed a massive trade for Micah Parsons, one of the handful of NFL players who can claim to be the best in the league. The Dallas Cowboys were fleeced and should have extended him last offseason, then should have extended him this offseason, and now have shown their entire locker room that they are deeply unserious.
But we are a Buffalo Bills site, so that isn’t the focus of this article. If I was Bills general manager Brandon Beane, I absolutely would have made a trade similar to this one. I don’t think Ed Oliver plus two firsts would have been enough, but even throwing in a player like A.J. Epenesa or another third-round pick or whatever would have made the compensation part worth it. Absolutely make the move.
Kenny Clark was the player the Packers sent to Dallas, and he’s a 30-year-old three-time Pro Bowler with three years left on his deal. Oliver is two years younger, but has never been named to the Pro Bowl, so I think it would have needed a sweetener for the Cowboys to save face. (It would have been interesting to add Joey Bosa as the extra player to open the rotation spot…)
So here’s the thing, the Bills weren’t able to trade for Micah Parsons. As much as certain folks in the media want to claim the salary cap doesn’t exist, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the cap.
The Packers started Thursday with $23 million in cap space, meaning they could trade for Parsons and his $22ish million salary. Easy peasy. They now have less than $4 million in available cap space until the Parsons extension becomes official, but they had to fit him on their current cap in order to complete that trade and subsequent extension.
The Bills started Thursday $6 million over the cap, according to Spotrac. That is not possible under the CBA, so the Bills have made a move or two already to lower their cap number to be in compliance, we just don’t know about them. Here are some ways the Bills could have created enough cap space for Micah Parsons:
That would have created the $29 million in space the Bills needed to get Parsons under their 2025 cap.
The ripple effect would have obviously pushed the majority of those dead cap hits to the 2026 cap. Jones and McGovern are on expiring deals, and Knox has no more guaranteed money remaining and facing a release. That $15 million in dead cap would all hit in 2026, where Buffalo is currently projected to only have $8 million or so in cap space (without a Parsons extension, mind you)....
