Cap penalty discrepancy - or not?

[aston217]

I communicated with Solecismic about this some time ago. At the time, I was told this was working as intended, but I've still got my doubts.

Here's a summary:

- If a player is signed midseason, you get a pro-rated credit to "Lost Cap Room". It's reduced by (X/17) * (Signee Salary) where X = weeks played, to reflect that he hasn't been on the team the entire year.

- If a player is released midseason, you get a pro-rated addition to "Lost Cap Room", also in the amount of (X/17) * (Player Salary). This is to reflect salary that has already been paid.

In most cases, it seems the two functions basically cancel each other out, or approximately. (Only the Top 51 players count against the cap and I haven't looked at what happens if the new signee isn't, versus is, part of the new Top 51).

In some cases, though, I'm adding players permanently to the team without releasing anybody, because other players are going on IR. In those cases, my team gets salary cap relief that isn't reversed even upon later releases.

If you're in the CFL with me, you'll note that Green Bay -- which has a particularly grisly 8-players-on-IR situation at this point -- has a negative cap penalty this year, heading into the bowl week. We started the season with a small positive cap penalty ($1-3M is my guess; I can't remember).

And here's the official explanation:

Since cap penalties are based on the sum of players under contract during the season, lost cap room is adjusted to reflect that not all of that salary would have counted under the cap. It reverses upon release, though if you held the player a week, you'd notice it wouldn't completely be reversed.

Maybe I'm really missing something and this is how it is truly intended to work?

I know that with adding these players late in the season, I'm not impacting my cap very much since they aren't being paid very much. However, having *more* cap as a result does not seem right.

Overall, it's really not a big deal. Even with such a large number of IRs, we're talking about a discrepancy approximately 1-1.5% of the overall salary cap. So if it is a bug, it's probably not even worth fixing.

But perhaps it's something worth being common knowledge -- especially for teams who operate right on the line and may be worried about their ability to sign expensive FAs during the season should they need to place anybody else on IR.