Although I’ve learned plenty about the salary cap and NFL contracts in general over the years, there are several times where I still have difficulty understanding how these rules shape the rosters. How many big contracts can a team hold in a given year? Can your favorite team afford to re-sign that player you really like? Can a team be a serious player for a high profile free agent, or do they have to focus on the draft and the bargain bin?
To help clarify some of these questions, I’ve decided to investigate what I’ll refer to as the texture of an NFL roster. I will classify contracts and cap figures into several tiers, look at how each team balanced the cap numbers of their players into those tiers from last year, and then evaluate what sort of requirements and limitations teams face in order to build a roster that’s not only compliant with the salary cap, but able to be competitive against the rest of the league.
Here are the ranges for the four veteran categories for 2014:
Elite | 1-32 | $22,412,500 | $11,250,000 |
High | 33-160 | $11,250,000 | $5,400,000 |
Middle | 161-320 | $5,400,000 | $3,202,125 |
Low | 321 and lower | $3,200,000 | $635,000 |
To take away context from texture, it’s important to compare and contrast the cap dollars spent on each category to how many players actually reside in those categories. As you might imagine, just a few players are responsible for an oversized amount of the cap space taken up in any given year. To illustrate this fact, let’s take a look at the average texture for NFL teams in 2014, represented both by cap numbers and by players on the roster:
As you can see, the six slices of the pie are relatively close to each other in proportion when it comes to cap spending. However, while the three highest paid categories (Elite, High, and Middle veteran players) make up only 10 roster spots on average (about 1/6th of the roster), they typically account for half of all cap expenditures. Similarly, and as you’d expect, while players on Rookie contracts constitute about 5/8ths of a roster, they only take up about a quarter of the spending.
These are the numbers that I’m thinking should be kept in mind when one considers what the future of their players could be. For example, say you have one player (usually a quarterback) that will be incurring Elite cap charges for the foreseeable future. If you need to push another player to the Elite level, does that mean that you have to cut back on signing veterans in the High to Middle range? Does that mean you have to restructure your current Elite player’s contract to reduce his cap number—at the risk of having it higher later?
This is a concept that’s very much in development, so it’s always good to have more eyes on it, and if you have anything to add, please do so in the comments. In this article, here’s where I take a look at 2014 textures for all 32 NFL teams so we can take a look at some real-time examples.
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