I think the cost-control is used as a relative term, compared to the previous CBA. Brian McIntyre made a good point the other day with respect to first-round payouts for rookies under the old CBA versus the current CBA:

“2010 1st rd picks made $600M over first 4 seasons. 2011 1st rd picks slated to make $347M in first 4 seasons”

Source: https://twitter.com/brian_mcintyre/status/463322152154836993

The fifth year of those rookie contracts (and sixth for picks 1-16) were similarly large. Compared to that, the fifth-year options for 2011 rookies probably don’t look so bad.

Two good salary resources:

Current – Over The Cap ( http://overthecap.com/ ) is the most complete *100% free* resource online.

In addition to information for each player and team in the current season, data is available for future years. There are also some cool features such as a salary cap calculator to evaluate how various moves (e.g., cuts, trades, free agent re-signings) affect 2014 and beyond ( http://overthecap.com/calculator/ ).

Past – Ian Whetstone maintained an impressive *100% free* listing of salary cap data for all 32 teams for several years. Some of his data spans back to the early 2000s. The rookie signing numbers are available from 2006-2012. What was nice about Whetstone’s data was that it was all available as downloadable Excel spreadsheets and Word documents.

http://www.ianwhetstone.com/football/cap.html

Contracts can be so confusing when you start talking about base salary, cap value, guaranteed value, etc.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about how good Castonzo and Amukamura are. But why would ~$7M next year be cost-controlled? Do you only say that from the standpoint, that if they play well in 2014, that their 2015 salaries are locked in? As of right now, Amukamura is now listed with the 8th-highest base salary for CB in 2015. If his 2014 is about the same as his recent play, would he get paid that much in the open market?

(Sometimes it can be frustrating looking up salaries on Spotrac, because they don’t track historical contracts. Maybe some day PFR will add “actual salary” to the players history. Or is it already there someplace? I’d love to see some analysis regarding salary/performance comparisons.)