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The New York Giants have been on a wild free agent shopping spree these past 10 days which has been astounding since they were over the salary cap until just hours before the new year league began.
That has led them to embrace the league’s new age counting practices such as adding ‘voidable’ years to contracts and manipulating other contract details to save cap space.
Teams got caught short this year when the salary cap — which should have been around $210 million in normal times — was set at $182.5 million after a year of financial hurt brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Giants will now face another crunch as the NFL draft approaches. They have six picks in this year’s draft — one in each of the first four rounds and two in the sixth round. According to Spotrac, they will need $7.8 million in cap space to sign to those six players ($5.8 million Top 51).
Big Blue currently has a projected Top 51 number of $9.3 million in cap space to deal with, but that apparently does not include the recent three-year, $39 million deal they signed cornerback Adoree Jackson to on Monday.
The details on Jackson’s deal are still not cast in stone. When they are booked, we will see a truer picture of where the Giants are financially. But as we know, a team does not necessarily have to set aside the full amount of cap space needed to sign their rookies as long as the corresponding cuts made to the roster are equal to or greater than the rookie salaries they add.
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