How Dawn Aponte Can Help Improve Giants Salary Cap Management

The New York Giants’ reported hire of Dawn Aponte to the role of senior vice president of football operations will usher in, hopefully, a new and improved method for managing the team’s salary cap.

Since 2020, the first year of the COVID pandemic, the Giants have never ranked in the top half of the league in total cap space, according to Spotrac's historical records.

After peaking at 18th in terms of space in 2023, the second year of current general manager Joe Schoen’s tenure, the Giants have ranked at or near the bottom of the league, with their worst ranking coming in 2025 when they were 26th in terms of cap space.

The problem isn’t necessarily the spending by the Giants, though; whether they get the return on their investments is a topic for another article. It’s that the Giants haven’t, at least in recent years, taken full advantage of available mechanisms to help them optimize their annual cap dollars.

There are two key approaches in particular that the Giants haven’t really made heavy (if any) use of, and that hopefully Aponte, assuming she does indeed take over management of the team’s cap, puts into practice.

Voidable Years

Ever wonder why the Philadelphia Eagles always seem to have so much cap space? That’s because general manager Howie Roseman, who puts on a masterclass in cap management, is a big fan of using voidable years in contracts.

A voidable year, which is a year the player will never see with that team on that deal, allows a team to spread out the signing bonus over up to 5 years.

For example, if a player signs a five-year contract with two voidable years and a $20 million signing bonus, the signing bonus prorates to $4 million per year for the life of the contract.

In such an instance, a team might allocate all the guaranteed money a player is going to get in the first two years of the contract (thereby making that five-year deal more of a two-year investment).

The third year, in which there is no more guaranteed money, gives the team the option to either extend the player if he is performing well and is part of the team's plans moving forward, or let him ride out the final year of the deal.

But here is where the beauty of using voidable years comes into play. A good cap manager should be able to project where future cap figures are going to come into play.

In doing so, they can then project how much of the dead money–in our example, the $8 million from the two voidable years–will depreciate.

In other words, whereas the $8 million might count for 4% of the allocated cap once the deal is signed, thanks to the league-wide cap's continuous growth, that 4% might drop to 2% of the total team cap by the time the voidable years kick in.

Option Bonus

Another mechanism that seems to be picking up steam around the league is the use of option bonuses, which, according to the NFL’s Football Operations, “Gives a team (or, at times, a player) the ability to exercise the current or future years of the contract by paying a bonus.”

Option bonuses, such as signing bonuses, can be prorated over the life of the contract or up to 5 years, whichever is shorter.

The beauty of option bonuses, besides helping to avoid the ongoing snowballing effect of kicking the can down the road through constant restructures, which in turn leads to that dead money figure counting for its full value against the cap instead of depreciating, is that a team can put various trigger points as to when the option bonus is paid out.

It also allows for the player’s base salary to be reduced for that year if the option is exercised, as their new base salary figure becomes the difference between the original base and the option bonus for that year, which offsets some of the base.

For example, if a player has a $9 million base salary and a $7 million option bonus that gets exercised that year, their base drops to $2 million, the option bonus now is eligible to be prorated equally over the remaining life of the contract up to a maximum of five years, whichever is shorter.

The drawback of an option bonus is that if the contract is terminated early, the remaining unamortized, prorated bonus money accelerates into the current year’s cap.

So while option bonuses are a good way to make space for a team without jamming up its cap in future years, there is a slight risk, though, again, with careful planning and projection, it is manageable.

Final Thoughts

Giants General Manager Joe Schoen | Julian Leshay Guadalupe/NorthJersey.com / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

The Giants, of late, have tried to optimize their salary cap space through restructures that push money into future years; eventually, the bill comes, and it turns out to be a hefty one.

They have also, in some cases, deployed more “Not Likely to Be Earned” (NLTBE) incentives, which only count against the ensuing league year’s cap and only if the player achieves the incentive, which is based on what the player did the year prior.

The other thing the Giants have tried is driving more money through workout bonuses.

But overall, they have not been as proactive with using every available mechanism to optimize their cap space, which is why, in part, they have ranked toward the bottom of the league in space by the end of every season–space, we might add, that can be carried over to the following year to add a further boost to whatever amount they are initially projected to start with.

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Voidable Years

Option Bonus

Final Thoughts

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