Everywhere you turned in Indianapolis, you saw front-office men chatting with agents. Drew Rosenhaus
tweeted he met with all 32 teams here. That’s because the start of free agency is 15 days away, and the crop could be very good … and the average NFL team is about $17.8 million under the projected $130 million cap number. That should mean that after three years of an essentially flatlined NFL salary cap (2011: $120.4 million; 2012: $120.6 million; 2013: $123 million), teams will be tempted to spend like they haven’t in the past couple springs.
It’s basically a time of implicit tampering, when agents are taking the temperature on their potential free-market players. No deals are supposed to be made before the March 11 opening of the market, but it’s naïve to think deals aren’t discussed. Not by every team, but certainly some.
The heightened activity this year is also because the meter is running on the salary cap in every NFL front office. There was a provision in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement that most in the public have forgotten but that’s soon going to come into significant play. In the four cap years 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, each NFL team must spend a minimum of 89 percent of its cap money. And the league must spend a collective minimum of 95 percent of its cap money. That was put in to stop teams from hoarding money and not spending it.
Oakland, for instance, has a substantial amount of cap money available—about $70 million—and the Raiders will be almost forced to spend a large amount of it or deal with onerous league sanctions at the end of the four-year period, in 2017.
There’s an estimated $470 million in cap money available to teams to spend this contract season, and GMs know they can’t hoard that money for long.