Now that the book has closed on the incredible Drew Brees era in New Orleans, the “salary cap hell” boogeyman we’ve been hearing about for years has officially arrived.
To their credit, the New Orleans Saints more or less proved that if an owner is willing to do whatever it takes from a cash perspective — and if the cap keeps rising each year — a team can manipulate the cap so much that it is not really a true constraint. At the end of the day, the cap is just an accounting system that artificially suppresses salaries for players in the NFL, as is the case in all professional sports.