Five Years Dead for Cap Purposes: A Saints Saga

The path out of salary cap hell is finally within reach. Will the Saints take it, or be led yet again into temptation?

Each year, after the New Orleans Saints achieve salary cap compliance, they celebrate by doing a little shopping. It’s like a dieter rewarding themselves for losing a pound by going straight to Cracker Barrel.

This year’s victory splurge was former Chiefs safety Justin Reid on a three-year deal at a reported $31.5 million. The “reported” salary, inflated when discussing most signings, is always important when it comes to the Saints, who have an organizational fetish for hidden surcharges.

Reid replaced Tyrann Mathieu in Kansas City back in 2022, when Mathieu signed with the Saints for three years at $28.3 million. Signing Mathieu, a big-name star at a time when the Saints appeared to be in deep cap doodoo, was something of a flex: THE CAP IS FAKE SUCKAS, WE JUST SIGNED DA HONEY BADGER.

Mathieu, who turns 33 in May, can still play but no longer inspires catchy nicknames. He signed a two-year extension at $13.5 million with the Saints in 2024, exchanging an extra year for some cap relief, then restructured that extension last week for a little more.

The most recent restructuring was more of a financial necessity than a football choice. Releasing Mathieu – something a 5-12 team might reasonably do to a safety in his mid-30s – would drop about $11 million in dead cap hits on the ledger for the next two years. And the Saints never have that sort of wiggle room.

So Mathieu and Reid will now join forces on the back end of a defense which finished 21st in DVOA last year, meaning it needs help no safety can really provide. The Saints’ retail therapy acquisitions are starting to pile up, like the huddled masses of Home Shopping Club figurines on your mother-in-law’s bookshelves.

Mathieu and Reid will be busy. The Saints traded Marshon Lattimore, their best cornerback, to the Commanders last season. They signed Lattimore to a $97-million extension in 2021, then restructured that deal in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Each time, the Saints converted Lattimore’s salary into a bonus, which pushed his cap hits further into the future.

We’re now living in that future: Lattimore is in Washington, but he’s eating $31.7 million in cap space for the Saints.

Paulson Adebo, the Saints’ second-best cornerback, signed with the Giants this week; even ordinary cornerbacks can fetch premium salary offers that a cap-strapped team can struggle to match. That leaves Kool-Aid McKinstry, coming off a lumpy rookie season, and slot guy Alontae Taylor, who got torched when forced into an increased role in 2024, as the top Saints cornerbacks. Soccer-flopping journeyman Ugo Amadi, their CB3, is still a free agent at presstime.

To their credit, the Saints do manage to retain in-house free agents at times. Reclamation project Chase Young is sticking around after a 5.5-sack season. Tight end Juwan Johnson has agreed to a new three-year contract. (“It's a big commitment to an inconsistent player,” deadpanned John Sigler at SaintsWire.) The Saints also re-signed Dante Pettis for inexplicable reasons.

Players in greater demand, however, often move on to teams that don’t have to pay them Tuesday for a hamburger today. Edge rush perma-prospect Payton Turner signed with the Cowboys, who have a case of Zack Baun envy. (Baun, you might recall, was plucked from the Saints bench by the Eagles last year.) Marquez Valdes-Scantling, who proved surprisingly useful last year, is heading to the Seahawks.

If you think that the cap is fake or that the Saints have been unaffected by their five years of cap shenanigans, imagine rooting for a five-win team that spends the start of free agency deciding whether it can afford to keep Dante Pettis or Marquez Valdes-Scantling.

The Derek Carr Situation

Cap Compliance Day is the Saints Super Bowl and Mardi Gras rolled into one. The start of each new league year is like a nonagenarian’s birthday, a “made it through another one” celebration of perseverance and sheer survival as accomplishments in themselves.

There was a rebellious glamour to the Saints’ ability to defy economic common sense and remain around .500 from 2021 through 2023. They were like the Cirque Du Soleil of phantasmagorical accounting. Now, their tapdance atop the salary cap highwire looks like a stale vaudeville act.