Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane told Kim and Terry Pegula that it would take a couple years to reshape the roster and salary cap to the way it should be when he was hired to run the personnel department. Look ahead to the 2019 salary cap space available and you can see the fruits of those labors.
The Bills have shed a few massive contracts over the last two seasons, in many cases gaining assets in the process. But a lot of the corresponding cap hits have come in 2017 and 2018. The dead money on the deals - the remaining signing bonus money that hadn’t yet been accounted for in the salary cap structure - is all accelerated when the player is released or retires.