Whenever a team signs a player to a big contract, there is always the concern that the player won't live up to that deal. If a team has enough of these players and can't easily get out of the contracts, that could push the franchise back years and get a lot of people fired.
Yesterday I looked at the NFL's most underpaid veterans -- guys no longer on a rookie deal -- and today we'll see who's the most overpaid. One way to figure out who the most overpaid players in the NFL are is by looking at the Jahnke Value Model, which determines how much money a player should be counting against the cap based on how well he plays. When you compare that to how much he actually is counting against the cap (according to OverTheCap.com), that leaves us with a quantitative answer on exactly how much he is being overpaid.
In some cases a player hasn't lived up to his contract simply due to injury, and for the purposes of this top 10 list those players were ignored; we're not having bad luck count against them. This just leaves the players who aren't playing as well as their contracts suggest they should be.
1. Charles Johnson, 4-3 DE, Carolina Panthers
2015 cap hit: $20.0 million
2015 JVM: $6.2 million
Value differential: $13.8 million
In 2011, Charles Johnson signed a six-year deal with the Panthers. It was structured so that his cap hit would be enormous in 2015, but if he was cut it would give Carolina $14 million in dead money. With the lack of other options on the roster, the Panthers had no choice but to keep Johnson.