Sure, players have to be willing to do it, but in this case, it would involve giving them more of the money they were going to earn anyway SOONER. I doubt many players would have a problem with that.
So who do we restructure?
Again it's easy to say restructure, but opening up cap space now by pushing money into the future doesn't make the problem go away.
We're $15-20 million over the cap for 2015, based on the projection that the cap will not increase too much from 2014. We can't roll over cap space because what we have left was already rolled over from 2013.
We have decisions to make on key players like Jared Odrick and Charles Clay. Keeping Odrick won't be cheap. Clay is driving down his price a bit given his play this season, but he still is going to want more money and there is no tight end to replace him on this roster. You don't have the cap space to franchise those guys and you wouldn't want to anyway. Shelby is an RFA, what are you going to do with him?
You can restructure Wallace, but $3 million of his base salary is guaranteed for 2015. You can't restructure Albert because his entire base salary is guaranteed. Most of Grimes base salary is guaranteed.
You're going to have to cut some big contracts such as Ellerbe and Wheeler in an attempt to get under the cap, but cutting them leaves a lot of dead cap.
So back to the original point...
Alex Mack has double digit cap numbers as far as the eye can see. We're projected to be well over the cap. There are some tough decisions to make with a couple of key players as well as some big contracts. The biggest cap numbers are tough to restructure because of guaranteed base salaries.
I just don't see how the Dolphins could have made that move. They will probably not be big players in free agency next season so they better start getting their heads out of their asses when it comes to drafting quality talent if this team is going to get better in 2015.