Cap Savings: Ravens QB Joe Flacco hopes his restructure will keep continuity on the offensive line

Over the last three years, people from regular NFL fans to the national media have put on this perception that Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco has eaten up all of the Ravens salary cap space to sign players which is not true to say the least. Anyone following the situation knew that when Flacco signed his six year contract worth 120 million in 2013, that the Ravens would revisit Flacco's contract after three seasons when his cap number would hit 28.5 million.

Well, now we are here and the Ravens extended Flacco's contract where he will earn 22.1 million and others outside of the Ravens organization will make it look like Flacco ruined the Ravens salary cap space even more when he just saved the Ravens 6 million dollars under the cap for this offseason alone.

Flacco is committed to winning and he certainly wants the Ravens to keep its high quality free agents like offensive lineman Kelechi Osemele as he discussed via ProFootballTalk.com

"We've got a bunch of good players and we've got a great foundation already but with the way the deal was before I mean it might not have been this year but at some point there was gonna be a strain on what we could do and what kind of guys we could bring in," Flacco noted. "You don't wanna see any of the guys on your team have to be let go because of some issue with the cap and I wanted to play here.

I wanted to play here, I want to play here, continue to play here for a long time. So getting something done I just felt like it helped out you know a couple things. It keeps me here for a long time and it also allows us to go do some things that you know we may need to do and it allows us to keep guys that we might have to think about doing things with if we didn't get anything done."

The Ravens entering the 2015 season retained all five of its starting offensive linemen from the 2014 season which was the first time in franchise history that it retained all five starters in back to back seasons. Going forward, if the Ravens are able to re-sign Osemele, the Ravens could very well decide to cut ties with left tackle Eugene Monroe who signed a five year deal worth 37.5 million dollars during the 2014 offseason.

But as it relates to Flacco, whatever he says at this point will be ignored by many because there will be people who think they know about the salary cap and will continue to blame Flacco's contract during any struggle the Ravens may have from here on out through the 2021 season.