NFL GM & Salary Cap Simulator: How Manage The Cap Works
Manage The Cap — Fanspeak's Ultimate GM Simulator — puts you in the general manager's chair for a full NFL offseason. It is a GM simulator and an offseason simulator in one: you pick a team, inherit its real contracts, and work the cap sheet through seven stages — franchise tags, cuts, restructures, trades, free agency, and a draft where every rookie you take signs a real contract that counts against your cap. Free, and no signup required.
It runs on licensed Over The Cap contract data rather than estimates, and every dollar figure you see is computed on the server from that data, not guessed in the browser.
What it is
Most cap tools show you a spreadsheet. Most GM simulators let you sign anyone and hand-wave the money. This does neither. It is a simulator whose arithmetic is the real arithmetic: top-51 accounting in the offseason, signing-bonus proration, dead money that accelerates when you cut someone, post-June-1 designations that split that dead money across two years, and rookie contracts slotted to the pick.
The consequence is that decisions cost something. Cutting a star to create room books the rest of his signing bonus as dead money immediately. Restructuring buys space this year by pushing proration into the next three. The tool shows you that bill at the moment you make the choice, not after.
If you have wanted to be the GM of your team for a whole offseason rather than for one draft weekend, this is that tool. Its companion, On The Clock, is the mock draft simulator; Manage The Cap is the eleven months around it.
The seven stages
The offseason runs in order. You can always go back to a completed stage from the progress bar at the top; you move forward with the single action button, which sits in the same place on every stage (pinned to the bottom of the screen on a phone).
1. Pick Team
Choose any of the 32 franchises. Every run is the 2027–28 offseason with a three-day free-agency window. On every stage after this one, a blue Autofill button can finish the stage's remaining work for you, with an undo on every move it makes.
2. Tags & Re-Signs
The tag window closes before the league year opens, so this comes first. One franchise tag and one transition tag, at real projected tag values by position — and you can re-sign your own pending free agents before the market opens, which is cheaper than bidding for them later.
3. Cuts & Restructures
Release players or convert base salary into a signing bonus. Every cut sheet shows the dead money you book now and whether the front office thinks the release is a mistake. Your cap has to be clean here — every club must be compliant before the league year opens.
4. Trades
Build a package of players and picks against any of the other 31 teams. Both sides must be cap-compliant after the trade. See Trades below for the money rules.
5. Free Agency
A day-by-day market against the clock. You submit offers; every other team submits theirs; players decide. Offers are evaluated on money against the player's market value, with later days getting more decisive. You can sim to the end at any point.
6. Draft
A full mock draft with trades, running on the same engine as Fanspeak's On The Clock simulator — and every pick made, by any team, immediately books a slotted rookie contract against that team's cap.
7. Off Season In Review
What you did and what it cost: the swing in cap space, where every dollar went, the dead money you created, the draft grade, where you now rank in the league, and what the next two years look like. Every phase is graded on its own, and you can put another team's offseason beside yours.
How the cap math works
Top-51
In the offseason only the 51 largest cap hits count against the cap. The tool accounts this way, which is why cutting a minimum-salary player often frees nothing at all — he was never counting.
Proration and dead money
A signing bonus is paid up front but charged to the cap in equal slices across the contract, up to five years. Cut the player and every remaining slice accelerates into the current year. That accelerated total is dead money: cap charged for a player who is no longer on your roster.
Post-June-1 designations
In the real league each team may designate two releases as post-June-1: the current year absorbs only that year's proration slice, and everything remaining lands the following year — a way of buying room now against a bill later. Releases in the tool are booked pre-June-1, so the dead money you see is the full, immediate bill.
Option bonuses
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Signing bonus already paid | All remaining proration accelerates on release |
| Option bonus due in a year at or after the release | The option is declined — it does not accelerate |
| Void years on the contract | Acceleration is booked into the first void year |
That second row matters more than it sounds. Treating a not-yet-exercised option as accelerating proration is the single most common way a cap estimate goes wrong on a star quarterback contract.
Tags
The franchise tag is a one-year, fully guaranteed salary at a position-specific value. The transition tag is cheaper and gives you the right to match another team's offer rather than compensation. You may use one of each per offseason, and both count against the cap the moment they are applied.
Trades
The NFL has no salary matching — that is a basketball rule. What it has instead is an asymmetric split of the contract:
| Side | What lands on their cap |
|---|---|
| Sending team | All unamortized signing-bonus proration, as dead money |
| Receiving team | Base salary, roster bonuses and workout bonuses for the remaining real years |
| Both | Must be cap-compliant after the trade |
So trading a highly-paid veteran is usually expensive for the team giving him up, not the one taking him on. Post-June-1 trades split the sender's dead money across two years. Trades never consume your two cut designations.
Pick values default to the Fitzgerald-Spielberger chart — Over The Cap's own, all 262 picks — with the Jimmy Johnson chart selectable. Players are priced on the same scale so a package of players and picks can be compared to a package of picks. Future picks are discounted 20% per year.
The draft
This is the part no other cap tool does. In a normal mock draft simulator, picks are free. Here every pick on every team signs a four-year slotted contract with a real signing bonus, and the first-year cap number lands on that team's sheet immediately.
Before the draft, each team holds a rookie pool — money reserved for its picks. As picks are made the reserve is released and replaced by actual contracts. Play fewer than seven rounds and the reserve for the unplayed rounds stays held, because those picks still have to be paid.
Drafted rookies are ordinary contracts from that point on: you can cut one, and you will book his remaining signing-bonus proration as dead money exactly like a veteran.
The draft room itself is the On The Clock engine — CPU teams draft to need and value, propose trades, and the board is the Fanspeak consensus big board. Your class is graded on value against the board and on how well it covered your needs.
Where the numbers come from
Contracts and per-season cap figures come from Over The Cap through a Fanspeak-licensed API — the same source the published cap sheets use. Team-level figures (carryover, adjustments, existing dead money) are derived from Over The Cap's own cap-space table rather than typed in by hand.
Every ingest runs an assertion suite before the data is allowed to ship, including a per-team reconciliation against Over The Cap's live cap-space figures. Draft pick order and the prospect board come from Fanspeak's own data. Player bios and headshots come from the NFLverse dataset.
Numbers the licensed endpoints do not carry — per-game and incentive bonuses, per-year guarantees — are absent rather than estimated. Where that makes a figure a floor, the interface labels it.
FAQ
Is Manage The Cap free?
Yes. There is no account required to run an offseason.
Is Manage The Cap a GM simulator?
Yes. It is the offseason half of being an NFL general manager — the setup page calls it the Ultimate GM Simulator. You apply franchise tags, cut and restructure contracts, trade, sign free agents and draft for one club, all against its real cap sheet. The draft-weekend half is On The Clock, our mock draft simulator; the two run on the same player and team data.
Which season does it simulate?
The upcoming offseason. The cap sheet you start from is the real current one, and the plan you build is for the following league year, with rosters, contracts and the projected cap rolled forward.
Why is my cap space different from the number on another site?
Almost always one of three things: offseason top-51 accounting versus a full-roster count, a different treatment of not-yet-exercised option bonuses, or per-game and incentive bonuses that the licensed data does not itemise. The first two are handled the way the league handles them.
Can I cut a player I just drafted or just signed?
Yes, and it will cost you. Rookie deals and free-agent contracts carry real signing bonuses, so releasing one accelerates the remaining proration onto your sheet like any other contract.
Does the CPU actually manage the other 31 teams?
Yes. Other teams make their own cuts and restructures, apply their own tags, bid against you in free agency, and draft to their own needs — all against their own real cap sheets.
Does a page reload keep my offseason?
Yes. The offseason is checkpointed at the end of each stage — on this device, and to your account as well when you are signed in — so a reload, or coming back the next day, offers to continue from where you stopped. Starting a new game overwrites that save.
How is the draft grade calculated?
On two axes: value — how far each prospect fell past his board ranking, weighted by the draft capital you spent — and needs, how much of your pre-draft board you covered, with unfilled high-priority needs penalised. The two combine into a 0-100 score and a letter grade, and every individual pick gets its own grade and a one-line reason.