The Colts have moved $2.85mil in salary cap space for 2009 by their yearly manipulation of bonuses.  The re-signing of Lance Ball was the intermediary allowing the team to move the space.

In short, the procedure by which bonuses are moved are writing a late-season contract for bonuses that are automatically deemed likely-to-be-earned by the type of bonus they are.  As such, they are included in the team’s salary cap calculations during year.  However, they are carefully constructed to ensure that the bonus will never actually be earned, meaning that at the end of the year when they are officially unearned, the team gets a cap credit for the following year.

Such a procedure is commonly used by all teams to move remaining cap space forward from one year to the next.

While such a manuever will ultimately help the Colts gain cap space in 2009, their options at this point based on my preliminary calculations remain quite limited in terms of signing anyone beyond rookies.

“Once we get the coaching situation straightened out we’ll be off to the All-Star games – the Shrine Game in Houston and the Senior Bowl in Mobile – and then we’ll be back here around the first of February. Then, we’ll begin preparation for next year. That’s seven days a week and however many hours it takes. Next year is virtually upon us.

The issue we face this year that’s different than any other year since 1993 when this Collective Bargaining Agreement was put in place is that this is the year preceding 2010, which is the last uncapped year. Ironically, enough Jim Irsay and I were part of the committee that put together the framework of this original agreement, which three or four times has been renewed. There are special rules that relate to the last capped year, which ’09 is. Those rules are designed to make it onerous for both players and clubs so that they will go to the bargaining table.

Since there is no executive director of the National Football League Players Association and may not be until at least April 1, it is likely that no deal will be done this year. So, we will go through the last capped year with these very stringent rules that change things dramatically in terms of how you structure the cap, in terms of how the cap is accounted for and what decisions you make.

It’s very complex, but I’ll hit just two high spots. The most important and most hurtful one for the clubs is that a player who has outstanding bonus on the books – a player who signed a five-year contract for $5 million – if he is going to be cut at the end of two years, he has $3 million still on the books. Under the old rules, $1.5 million would count this year on the cap and $1.5 million would count next year. Under these new rules, $3 million counts right now. So, for the first time in the 11 years we’ve been here, Jim and I together will face some squeezing of the cap. We never have before. We’ve managed it perfectly so that there have been no cap ramifications whatsoever.

Secondly, players who are entering new contracts may not receive anything but a 30 percent increase year to year. In (cornerback) Kelvin Hayden’s case he’s a free agent who we will very likely re-sign. He can receive no more than a 30 percent increase over his first year for every succeeding year of his contract, which means obviously that his first year will have to be very, very cash heavy and very cap heavy. That squeezes your cap a little more. It’s what the system is designed to do. But we never anticipated we would enter this year. We thought there would be an extension before that. It’s a very different year with very different problems that we’re going to have to deal with.”