While the NFL increases the amount of the cap by leaps and bounds every season, teams can often find themselves up against the ceiling on a regular basis. The Dallas Cowboys generally have preferred to exist right up against the cap routinely. For the last decade plus, since the last CBA was agreed to, Dallas has preferred to give their big-money players lengthy deals with a ton of years, which gives them the wiggle room to manipulate the cap as they see fit, but still be as close to the cap limit as possible.

Manipulating the salary cap in any given year is easy. The Cowboys put language in their player’s contracts that allow the club to convert a season’s base salary into a restructure bonus and take advantage of league accounting rules that then spread that money across future year’s caps, even though the player gets the money in that same season. Over the last decade, they’ve used void years in the contracts to place the cap hits on seasons the player isn’t even going to be on the team.

This is one of two ways of having dead money on a specific year’s cap ledger, along with more common way when a team releases a player who still has unallocated bonus money that hasn’t yet hit the cap. In 2025, Dallas is going to run into both situations in a major way.

Out of their top 10 salary cap hits already on the books for 2025, according to Over the Cap, three of those are dead money hits.

Zack Martin (3rd) and DeMarcus Lawrence (10th) are both set to be unrestricted free agents in 2025 after 11 years, each, with the club. Their expiring contracts contained void years into the future, cap loopholes that allow a player to have a salary for a season that will be voided no matter what.

It’s literally cap cheating and is a ridiculous benefit the owners have given themselves to skirt their own rules.

Martin is scheduled to count over $27 million against the cap in 2025 for money that was paid to him already. Lawrence is on the books for just under $7.5 million.

Even if the Cowboys use the June 1 rule they included in Martin’s deal to split his dead money across both 2024 and 2025, the $10 million would rank him sixth in cap hits this coming season.

Meanwhile, Michael Gallup (7th) still exists on the Dallas books as well. The former third-round wide receiver was released this past offseason and has retired, but he will count $8.7 million against the Cowboys’ cap in 2025 because he was a June 1 release that split his cap hit over two seasons.

Often referred to as kicking the can down the road, there’s an argument to be made that it makes a lot of sense to use future year’s cap hits to account for a player’s salary.

If a team pays a player $10 million in 2024, but they don’t have to account for it against the cap until a future year when the salary cap is higher, it gives the team more bang for the buck because it takes up a lower percentage of the cap.

But that can only be realized if the team is winning, which the Cowboys are not. If the team isn’t good enough to compete for a championship, then using future cap space is an impediment to the club improving. That feels like the situation the 2025 Cowboys will find themselves in.