Presently, the Bills have about $5.47 million in 2015 dead money, with over $2.1 million coming from C.J. Spiller and about $1.5 million from both Kyle Orton and Alan Branch. The Bills do not have a contract like Fitzpatrick's or Johnson’s presently on the books; the maximum dead money the Bills could realistically receive from cutting a single player in 2015 would be $2.625 million (Chris Williams) or $2 million (Leodis McKelvin). Even if some additional dead money is undertaken through the cutting of Williams, Manny Lawson ($1.5 million), Kraig Urbik ($1.4 million), or Scott Chandler ($600,000), the days of the Bills losing such an enormous percentage of their salary cap to dead money appear, for the time being, to be gone.
The effects of having this much wasted money are obvious. Taking the 2013 and 2014 seasons together, 11 different teams won a combined 20 games. Of these 11, only three had a total dead money number higher than the league average of $29.3 million: Dallas at $44.8 million, New England at $35.4 million, and Arizona at $34.1 million. The top five teams in total dead money averaged just under six wins per season.
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