The Falcons are carrying nearly $19 million in dead money this year

Thomas Dimitroff and the Falcons' front office usually get props for managing their cap space effectively, if nothing else, and generally I'd say that's deserved. They've made mistakes, though, and some of those mistakes are showing up in a major way on the Falcons' 2016 cap space ledger.

Per Over The Cap, the Falcons are carrying $18.8 million in dead money this year, with $6.4 million of that tied up in Sam Baker, $3.9 million in Jon Asamoah, $3.7 million in Roddy White, and $3.3 million in William Moore, with several others accounting for less than a million dollars each. That's a lot of cash tied up in guys who are no longer on the team, and it speaks to how costly it can be when your big ticket free agent signings don't work out. Especially Sam Baker.

The reason this rankles a bit this year is that the Falcons missed out on a handful of free agents who ended up preferring the comfort of their own teams (George Iloka) or familiar coaches (Danny Trevathan), but might have been persuaded to come to Atlanta with a little more money heading their way. I think it's safe to presume that the Falcons weren't going to bid up on several guys, but they may have landed one more impact player if they weren't carrying around a truly impressive amount of dead cap space.

The good news for the Falcons is that heading into their 2017 season in their fancy new stadium, they currently have just $2.8 million in dead money listed for Paul Soliai, and should have a ton of space to make the splashes Arthur Blank's probably going to want for the new stadium. The biggest obstacle to the team's success is never going to be dead money, though, but the kind of poor decisions that lead to dead money in the first place.