Cap Space

The chaos of NFL free agency kicks off at 4 pm EST on March 9. Money should be flying as many teams have a lot of cap room to consume. The website sportrac does an excellent job of keeping track of each team's financial situation. The following is the available cap room for each of the 32 teams. The numbers are based on the expected salary cap of $154 million. That number is probably going to jump to about $156 million with the recent arbitration ruling that the NFL got a little creative with their bookkeeping. Basically, the NFL cheated the players of $100 million over the last three years and they got caught. That's just stupid. So each team will probably have a couple more million to spend than is listed below. The happiest about that are the teams at the bottom of the list.

Cap Space w/top 51 players($)
1.   Jacksonville Jaguars:  73,312,314
2.   Oakland Raiders:  72,851,440
3.   Chicago Bears:  59,199,330
4.   Los Angeles Rams:  58,319,684
5.   New York Giants:  56,473,688
6.   San Francisco 49ers:  53,750,507
7.   Tampa Bay Buccaneers:  48,567,574
8.   Tennessee Titans:  48,048,299
9.   Cleveland Browns:  38,786,320
10. Cincinnati Bengals:  37,598,157
11. Detroit Lions:  32,733,562
12. Kansas City Chiefs:  31,434,301
13. San Diego Chargers:  30,783,377
14. Houston Texans:  29,569,427
15. Atlanta Falcons:  29,351,495
16. Carolina Panthers:  28,280,220
17. Philadelphia Eagles:  26,461,770
18. Indianapolis Colts:  23,952,811
19. Minnesota Vikings:  23,241,146
20. Seattle Seahawks:  22,017,781
21. New York Jets:  20,656,364
22. Green Bay Packers:  20,271,031
23. Arizona Cardinals:  18,405,977
24. Washington Redskins:  11,988,590
25. Denver Broncos:  11,046,411
26. New England Patrtiots:  10,372,766
27. Pittsburgh Steelers:  10,269,316
28. Dallas Cowboys:  9,359,100
29. Miami Dolphins:  7,402,761
30. New Orleans Saints:  6,551,494
31. Baltimore Ravens:  5,205,629
32. Buffalo Bills:  -90,786

Those are ridiculous numbers. 6 teams with over $50,000,000 in cap space! It doesn't seem too long ago when the teams with the most cap space had about $20,000,000. And there weren't many teams that had that sort of room to spend. Most teams are managing the cap far better and then there's the little matter of the NFL simply raking in so damn much money. The players are seeing more of it now. At least when the owners aren't hiding it from them.

What are the Bills doing?

The Eagles have done an excellent job in the past few weeks of signing their own free agents. They signed franchise cornerstones Zach Ertz, Lane Johnson, Brent Celek, Vinny Curry, and Malcolm Jenkins before those players could even be tempted by other teams. The Eagles just have to get Fletcher Cox signed. He's the biggest "must-sign" of the bunch.

There should be some big contracts. No wonder Malik Jackson is supposedly seeking 12,000,000/year.