It’s 5 o’clock somewhere…
The 5 o’clock club is published from time to time during the season, and aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.
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I had planned to use today’s 5 O’Clock Club space to discuss positional spending [the amount of cap space devoted to each position group on the team], but when I started writing, I ran into a problem with the very first position I looked at. The table I was using for reference said that the Commanders were spending $8.5m at the quarterback position. Knowing that Marcus Mariota accounted for $6m on a one-year contract, I started digging into it.
I quickly found what I was already aware of — that Washington hasn’t yet signed its entire draft class, which means that the salary cap numbers available on sites like Spotrac and Over the Cap are — I won’t say ‘unreliable’ because that’s not the right word; let’s say, ‘incomplete’.
These sites, quite reasonably, don’t estimate unsigned contracts; players get added to the database as contracts are signed and details become known.
Right now, the two sites have similar estimates for Commanders available cap space:
- Spotrac = $43.814m
- OTC = $44.519m
Neither figure is correct — at least, neither figure will be correct after the Washington front office finishes signing the draft class. Until that happens, any salary cap analysis based on the information available from either site is more trouble than it is worth.
According to the detail on both sites, I infer that five drafted players remain unsigned:
- Jayden Daniels
- Johnny Newton
- Mikey Sainristil
- Ben Sinnot
- Brandon Coleman
In the meantime, everyone (including professional sports journalists) keeps quoting a figure of ~$44m in available cap space for the Commanders. The problem, of course, is that fans (and a lot of media members) start relying on that reported $44m figure as up-to-date and accurate, and will be shocked when it is suddenly much lower several weeks from now.
Until these five rookie contracts are signed, we won’t know the exact impact on the 2024 salary cap, but thanks to the ‘slotting’ of drafted players’ salaries and the good work of the fine folks at Over the Cap, it is easy to get a ballpark estimate for each player based on his draft position.
Estimated 2024 cap hits for the five unsigned draft picks:
- Pick 2 – Daniels – $6.86m
- Pick 36 – Newton – $1.774m
- Pick 50 – Sainristil – $1.4m
- Pick 53 – Sinnot – $1.314m
- Pick 67 – Coleman – $1.101m
Over the Cap estimates that these 5 players will account for about $12.45m in 2024 cap space.
Remembering the ‘Rule of 51’
Of course, because of the ‘Rule of 51’, when these 5 contracts are added to the cap space calculation, 5 other players will be pushed off. If that were to happen today, the 5 players pushed out of the top-51 (per OTC) would be Darion Davis, Tariq Castro-Fields, John Ridgeway, Armani Rogers and KJ Henry. Together, these 5 players have cap hits amounting to about $4.95m.
So, to estimate the available salary cap after these five draft picks have been signed, we do the following calculation:
- Current estimated cap space: $44m
- less: cap hits for 5 drafted players: $12.45m
- plus: add back for 5 players pushed off of top-51: $4.95m
The new expected available cap space will be around $36.5m.
Even that number shouldn’t be seen as anything close to ‘final’. Every team has to devote several million dollars in cap space each season to signing injury replacements, and there are always ongoing adjustments for things like benefits paid to players who have retired or been released, or bonus payments earned during the season. It’s likely that another $10m in cap space will get used up by the end of the season, meaning that if I had to guess right now, I would expect the Commanders to roll over about $24-28m in cap space to next season — a far cry from the ~$44m number people see being regularly reported this offseason.