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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/Ok-Health-7252 on 2024-04-21 18:29:18.
For us the Brown family rarely ever spends to the cap so the Bengals have never really been in cap hell before but the Akili Smith years were not great for us cap-wise because Smith was on a VERY expensive rookie contract (since there was no rookie pay scale back then) that prevented us from cutting him until 2003 and on top of that Corey Dillon signed a lucrative extension in 2001 (a year after he broke Walter Payton’s single-game rushing record). By 2002 we were paying three QBs (Smith, Jon Kitna, and Gus Frerotte) all starter money so that didn’t help. During that era the Bengals were employing the practice of benching players during the season to keep them from triggering their incentives and risk us running afoul of the cap.
Not to mention they tied up needless cap space in extending terrible underperforming players (like Artrell Hawkins and Rod Jones) because external free agents wouldn’t come here back then.