Dawgs By Nature
The Browns salary cap is a wild ride of accounting but Joel Bitonio retiring would not help it
As of now, the only comparison between the Cleveland Browns and the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles is how each works the NFL salary cap. It could have been two comparisons but Paul Brown’s bid to buy the Eagles failed back in the day.
Both Cleveland and Philadelphia pay their players, something Cincinnati Bengals QB Joe Burrow hopes his team does, and does so in a way that allows the front office to always bring in more players (read: Paying bonuses upfront). It isn’t always positive, as Browns fans know, but the cap is just an accounting tool.
With OL Joel Bitonio still mulling retirement, it is interesting to see what that might do to the Browns salary cap. While many fans might assume a player retiring would free up their team, we can look at the Eagles for another reference point. When OL Jason Kelce retired, Philadelphia ended up paying much more in cap space than if he would have played:
Kelce was originally scheduled to count for $10,178,000 on the 2024 salary cap. The Eagles would be left with $25,116,000 in dead money with an outright release and/or retirement. However, they could spread out his dead money hit over two seasons ($8,678,000 in 2024, and $16,438,000 in 2025) by keeping him on the roster until after June 1, which is what they will almost certainly do.
In the end, the Eagles did split the cap hit over two seasons with over $16 million in dead cap in 2025, the second season after he retired.
A retirement, from a salary cap perspective, is treated like a release. In Bitonio’s case, Cleveland currently will have just over $14 million on the salary cap if he plays. If he retires and the Browns release him before June 1st, it will cost the team an additional $203,000 against this year’s cap. If Cleveland makes him a post-June 1st release, as Philadelphia did with Kelce, they will save over $8 million this season but that will be dead cap in 2026.
A Bitonio retirement would not all of a sudden free up cap space for 2025 and would make the team worse this year as well. The Browns could split up the dead cap hit over two seasons but would only delay the cost.
Are you surprised that the NFL’s accounting could hurt teams like the Eagles and Browns when a player retires? Does the minutia of the salary cap interest you, hurt your head or bore you?
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