Salary Cap Issues

[immortal]

I was playing my final pre-season game last night with the Jets, after making some final transactions. After the game, I attempted to skip to the regular season, however this message appeared informing me that I could not continue to the regular season until I had less than 54 players and when my team salary was lower than the salary cap. So I noticed that I was $7 million over the cap, so I started making more transactions. Unfortunately, I could not try to lower my players contracts because the game only recognizes that you are over the cap and will not allow you to, so I had to either trade away some players for players with lesser salaries or just simply release some players, all the while taking the penalty in consideration.
Is there any other, less painful way I could've done this?

[jmarks2001]

Did you do a bunch of signing and trading without taking the cap into consideration in the first place?

[sportsgeist]

Nope. You need to either trade or release.

Only that you needed to keep an eye on your cap when you were signing those players. Try to find players with big contracts but low ratings and dump them. You should be able to find players around the same level for less money.

[immortal]

Thanx fellas. Yeah, I made a few moves beforehand without taking the cap into consideration. One such move was that I traded away Curtis Martin, without realizing that his penalty was higher than his salary. Making all those moves last night, dumping salary, trying to get under the cap, I actually felt like the GM last night.

[vinny]

I tried trading daunte culpepper after the third season for eli manning.
mannings contract was 13mil and dauntes worth 100mil over 10 years.
I traded and I had 14 mil in the hole and couldn't get out and had to start it over.
I tried the trade at the beginning of the regular season, before it was the pre-season. I still had a huge defecit but it let me play the rest of the games. Eli by the end of the year was rated better than culpepper and by the offseason my debt was gone.

Is this some kind of penalty for trading him?
Same penalty if you released him?

[immortal]

Many players have penalties for trading them or releasing them. For instance, say you wanna trade Culpepper for Manning. Let's say that Culpepper's salary is $10 million and his penalty is $5 million. Now let's say Manning's salary is 13 million. If you are the Vikings, then you are losing $8 million in this transaction because you gain $5 million in losing Culpepper due to the difference in his salary and penalty, but then you have to remember that you still have to pay Manning, so that is another $13 million in salaries, thus equaling an $8 million deficit. This is why I got in the hole. I didn't realize that I still had to pay the other players salary while taking the penalty into consideration.

[vinny]

Thanks for explaining it

[rock85]

Yeah i got into the same problem but what i did was get rid of strahan which right off the bat did the trick big salary and he had no penalty.So with him gone and a few other trades i was back with 4 million + in the bank