Jason Kelce, Josh Sweat, Fletcher Cox, Darius Slay, Bryce Huff, Chauncey Gardner-Johnson, Brandon Graham, Mekhi Becton and James Bradberry are long gone from the Philadelphia Eagles’ roster.

Their contracts endure, accounting for most of the $81.4 million in “dead money” against the Eagles’ cap this season. That’s nearly 30 percent of the $279.2 million cap allotment for each team in 2025, third-most in the league and five times the total 2025 dead money for the defending AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs, who face the Eagles in Week 2.

This would seem on the surface to be some kind of crisis, except the Eagles just won their second Lombardi Trophy in eight seasons, and oddsmakers have them among the favorites to win it all again.

Whether the Eagles are a model for others to follow, an anomaly or a combination remains debated within the league.

“I couldn’t be their cap guy because, boy, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, so scared that a strong wind would come by and just blow my house apart,” a cap manager from another team said. “Now, would I do what Philly does if I knew it was guaranteed to give me a ring? F— yes. I think everyone would.”

Some in the NFL consider the Eagles a “house of cards” that is perpetually on the verge of collapse, but has, to the team’s credit, thrived through a combination of outstanding evaluation, solid drafting, aggressive roster management, good injury luck and, critically, owner Jeffrey Lurie’s willingness to spend.

It’s this last part, the spending component, that invites a broader discussion on best practices. Should more teams push the way the forward-spending Eagles push? Led by Lurie and general manager Howie Roseman, the Eagles have consistently, more than other teams, spent more cash in the short term at the expense of future salary-cap space, getting what Roseman has called an “interest-free loan” as growing league revenues fuel massive increases in the cap each year.

The broader league is trending this way, but the Eagles have been way out front for more than a decade.

Eagles have consistently spent more than the salary cap for the past decade

Percentage of spending over or under the salary cap, by five-season period

Hover on a dot to see a team’s spending details
Salary cap+10%+20%+30%2015–192020–24← Spent under capSpent over →The Eagles ranked firstin spending from 2015-19and third from 2020-2024
Jason Fitzgerald of OvertheCap.com provided 10 years of spending data for this story. We calculated each team’s cash over cap percentage by dividing the cash spent in a given year by the league salary cap for that year.

The NFL salary cap is more flexible than caps in other sports. (Perhaps owners think it’s too flexible, considering commissioner Roger Goodell’s comments in May about the “integrity” of the cap.)

This is largely because cap charges associated with bonuses, unlike cap charges from base salaries, can be prorated across up to five years. Pairing large bonuses with small base salaries allows teams to pay players lots of money now while incurring the cap charges over time. The increasingly popular use of void years — dummy years to spread the cap hit beyond a contract’s expiration — magnifies the effect.

“Most teams are run by personnel guys, not finance people,” one team exec said. “The finance guys understand time value of money. A dollar today is less expensive than a dollar down the road when you are spending in advance.”

Roseman, whose first full-time NFL job was in the financial realm as counsel to the Eagles’ salary-cap staff, has compared Philadelphia’s tactics to financing a home when interest rates are low. The strategy keeps more resources available in the short term than if the buyer had paid for the home in full up front.

That is how the top 10 average annual salaries on the Eagles’ roster are worth a combined $240.6 million in annual average, while counting just $112.4 million against their cap in 2025. The gap between those numbers ($128.2 million) is the largest in the league and more than double the league average.

These tactics rely upon future caps increasing as NFL revenues climb (the cap has increased by about 11 percent annually since 2021). Owners must be willing to front more cash, and players who receive large bonuses must remain healthy and productive; if they leave the roster prematurely, future cap charges accelerate into the present, shrinking cap flexibility. Even then, owners can buy themselves out of a pinch.

After speaking with more than two dozen high-level NFL team executives on the topic, I’ve put together a 32-team analysis comparing on-field success to how much cash teams spend over the cap. That project publishes Thursday. Our mission today is to advance the conversation around the Eagles and on spending in general.

We begin by engaging three former NFL salary-cap managers whose teams reached Super Bowls during their tenures.

Mike Sullivan managed the Denver Broncos’ cap in the 2010s after a long career representing Aaron Rodgers and other NFL stars as an agent. Cliff Stein, who teaches sports law and contract negotiations at Northwestern University, oversaw the Chicago Bears’ cap from 2002-15 and stayed with the team as legal counsel through 2023. Jake Rosenberg worked closely with Roseman in managing the Eagles’ cap from 2012-24 before founding The Athlete Group, which advises college programs in the NIL era.

To test Stein’s point about there being no correlation between spending and winning, I created a Weighted Wins metric measuring combined success in the regular season and playoffs. Weighted Wins gives teams one point for each regular-season win; two for a wild-card win or first-round playoff bye; three points for a divisional-round win; four for a conference championship; and five for a Super Bowl win.

The top 10 teams in cash-over-cap spending from 2020-24 averaged 57.4 weighted wins. The bottom 10 teams in cash-over-cap spending averaged 39.0 weighted wins. The gap closes when we compare the top 16 spending teams (50.2 weighted wins) to the bottom 16 spending teams (46.3).

Over three- or five-year windows, there is frequently correlation between spending and winning. This makes sense because teams typically push harder when they think they are close to contending. Also, better players tend to cost more. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Tampa Bay (with Brady, but less so since) and Baltimore (since paying Lamar Jackson) have spent more over the past five years while succeeding. Some other high-priced rosters (Cleveland, New Orleans) have flopped, while others (Miami) have disappointed.

There is generally less correlation between spending and winning in any single year or over long periods of time, as spending tends to even out (and teams roll unused cap room into future years). The Eagles, for example, rank 20th in cash over cap rate (3.6 percent, as of Tuesday) in 2025, after moving on from five Super Bowl starters this offseason.

Spending guarantees nothing by itself, but if all teams were highly competent, using the time value of money with a rising cap would seem to create a competitive advantage.

“It gets skewed because teams who suck dump a bunch of money in free agency,” a team exec said. “The NFL is different from every league because the best players never get to free agency, so that is where the spending does not equal winning.”

The fact that Jacksonville and Cleveland have spent huge sums on players who failed to pan out hurts the correlation between spending and winning, without saying anything about the Eagles.

“When you are going full tilt, you can’t be wrong,” a team president said. “Philly is full tilt right now, but they put it in players who are theoretically going to continue to be blue-chippers for them: Saquon Barkley, Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, those guys. Where they could go sideways is if those players suddenly are not good anymore, or they get hurt. As long as you have done it on the right guys, then you’re fine.”

The Eagles are the only team to rank among the top five in cash-over-cap rate from 2015-24, 2015-19, 2020-24 and 2022-24.

“They have been able to live in that world because their signings on both sides, pro and college, have hit,” a former GM said. “I give Howie (Roseman) credit where credit is due. He has just found ways. He didn’t sit on his hands after he won a Super Bowl. He’s very aggressive, and I like that style.”

Winning two Super Bowls in eight years while playing in a third over that span makes it tough to call the Eagles’ model unsustainable, although they did suffer through volatility along the way. They fired Super Bowl-winning coach Doug Pederson after a 4-11-1 season in 2020. Philly’s big deal for quarterback Carson Wentz backfired. The Eagles paid him $39 million in 2020, his final year with the team, and then absorbed a then-record $33.8 million hit in dead money after trading him to Indianapolis.

The league’s requirement that teams place a portion of fully guaranteed salaries and bonuses into escrow is another big dividing line. For example, the Browns’ decision to sign Deshaun Watson to a fully guaranteed $230 million deal required owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to set aside roughly $185 million in escrow. Not even Philly has gone to that extreme, but the Eagles’ willingness to fund guarantees is notable. Many family-owned teams with varying degrees of success over the years (the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals, Indianapolis Colts and Arizona Cardinals, for example) are less willing to set aside these big checks.

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“The Eagles don’t care about funding money,” a cap manager from another team said. “That is a big deal versus a Pittsburgh or Cincinnati, whose structures are different based on funding alone. Philly does not care. Howie has given big deals to quarterbacks, doesn’t work out, cut bait and move on.”

Some in the league see this willingness to move on from mistakes, even at great cost, as a key to empowering the Eagles’ success.

“If you are going to operate that way, you have to consistently operate that way,” a different cap manager from another team said. “You can’t take five chances because one in five may work, and everyone looks at that as a disaster. But if we had taken 10 chances, maybe that evens out to five or six of them working. They do it all the time.”

Focusing on whether the Eagles are living too close to the edge or doing a great job might miss the point.

“Both things are true,” another team president said. “They get ahead of things, and they pay. Yet, when you look at their cash spend compared to Buffalo, Baltimore, Kansas City — teams I would put in their category over the last decade — they pay more. And they had a couple of retrench years.”

The dead money Philly carries could just be the cost of doing business for the Eagles.

“I do not think (dead money) is quite the restriction it is made out to be,” another cap manager said. “If you are operating the way Cincinnati operates, that is going to be a problem. But if you have the cash, you can figure the cap out.”