Pre-Free Agency Salary Cap Check-In: Core Contracts and Cash Resources

Anthony takes stock of the current portfolio of contracts and estimates the 2026 cash budget for the Cleveland Browns

I’ll be showing up here at Browns Film Breakdown a few times a year to do a check in on where the Browns stand with the salary cap. With a new league year on the horizon, our focus in this edition will be on understanding the team’s biggest contracts and what resources the team can use.

The Basics

To begin, let’s touch on the basics of the Browns cap strategy in the Andrew Berry era. In an effort to spend as much cash as possible, the Browns pay players with option bonuses, signing bonuses, and base salary restructures converted to signing bonuses as much as they can. When players are paid in these ways, the cash can be prorated evenly across as many as five cap years. The result is that players will have small cap hits at the start of their contracts that gradually increase while they remain with the team. As soon as their contract expires or voids, the remaining dollars accelerate into the current cap year (or years if the contract is terminated/designated to terminate after June 1st). With the cap approach this front office has taken, managing spending around those ballooned cap accelerations is key.

The Core

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when looking at the wall of numbers that describe an NFL team’s cap situation. The reality is that most players are playing under contracts that can not be negotiated on the open market. Teams will typically close the offseason with about 20 vested veteran contracts. These contracts describe a large part of a team’s cap situation.

Cleveland will kick off the new league year with 10 vested veteran contracts on the books for 2026. Each contract will have some quirks and nuances. Here is what you need to know about each of them (cash remaining in parenthesis):

Deshaun Watson ($46m/1y - Fully Gtd)

Watson is in the final year of his five-year $230m fully guaranteed mega deal. As has been the case every year, $44.7m of Watson’s $46m base salary will be restructured and split evenly among the next five “years”. As the contract functionally ends after this season, four of those years will be void years meaning all of the proration in those cap years will accelerate into the current cap year when the contract ends. However, the team has added a “dummy year” to Watson’s contract, which will enable them to retain Watson through the start of the 2027 league year where the Browns can designate him as a post-June 1st termination. Baring a miracle, Watson will be released roughly a year from today. His final three cap hits should be $44.9m this year, $36m next year, and $52.9m in 2028.

Myles Garrett ($180m/5y - $62m Gtd)

Garrett inked a market setting extension last spring rather than continuing to press his trade request. This offseason, just like last, a pre-June 1st Garrett trade would be difficult to pull off. Were Garrett to be traded at the start of the league year, $41.1m of signing bonuses and restructures paid in previous years would count toward the 2026 salary cap instead of his current $23.7m number. Not literally impossible, but it would sponge up all of the team’s available cap space. It will become impossible on March 25th when Garrett’s $29.2m fully guaranteed option is scheduled to be exercised. A trade before exercising the option would put the new team on the hook for paying it. If the Browns pay it, it’ll become dead cap in a trade. After June 1st, a Garrett trade would drop to a manageable $21.4m in 2026, but also leaves $48.9m in 2027 dead cap.