Cowboys among 11 teams to gain significant June 1 cap space

The Dallas Cowboys entered the 2024 offseason without a ton of cap space, but that wasn’t a real hinderance on their ability to add talent. While the front office played their usual two-inch fiddle about having only so much pie to spread around, those who analyze the salary cap know the club was making a conscious decision to reset their salary cap.

In years past, the Dallas Cowboys have utilized restructure triggers on veteran contracts in order to create as much salary cap space as they needed. Dallas avoided doing that this year, using the phrase all-in to fool the public into thinking they were going to be big-time players in free agency but actually meaning they were rolling with the hand they were dealt, as is. Still, there was one move that has now given them some additional wiggle room for the remainder of the offseason.

More than likely, the majority of the cap space saved from designating WR Michael Gallup as a June 1 cut will be rolled over until next season, but it will be available for Dallas to use as of Sunday. Gallup was released with the designation early in the offseason, which allowed him to seek employment elsewhere while teams still had money to spend, which he did in signing a one-year, $1.75 million contract with the Las Vegas Raiders.

Players released after June 1, or when a team uses one of their two annual designations during the spring, do not have their remaining bonus hits accelerated onto the current year’s cap.

Instead, the team still waits to reap the rewards of clearing the base salary off the books until this date, but the current year’s bonus allocation is all that sits as dead money on the current year’s cap.

The remaining bonus money, in the case of Gallup $4.35 million attached to each of his 2025 and 2026 salaries, will hit the cap as $8.7 million of dead money in 2025. If Dallas had outright released Gallup in March, all $13.05 million would’ve hit this year’s cap, costing Dallas more than keeping Gallup on the roster but not adding anything to next year’s cap in dead money.

Dallas was hardly the only team that did business in this manner. Here’s a look at the 12 teams who also just earned additional cap space.