When the NFL announces the salary cap for the upcoming league year, which it did on Monday, some teams are very excited by the prospect of that number.
For other teams, the accounting/reckoning is soon coming due.
As Tom Pelissero of the NFL Network reported, the 2023 salary cap will be $224.8 million, an all-time high, and quite a bump from 2022’s $208.2 million. You would think that this would have every NFL team in high cotton from a player payroll perspective, but as our friends at OverTheCap.com point out, there are just 15 teams — just under half the league — under that number in Effective Salary Cap Space (the cap number against the actual payroll, plus what it will take to sign at least 51 players and the rookie class) as we stand today.
Of course, all kinds of things are coming for the team in need of offsets. Players will be released, contracts will be restructured, and cans will be kicked down the road so that all teams can be in compliance with the cap when the new league year begins.
So, there’s a lot that’s going to happen, but as it stands now, here’s how all 32 NFL teams stand on either side of 2023’s $224.8 million salary cap, from the most under the cap to the most over. Teams over the cap have their totals represented in parentheses as negatives.
(All salary cap numbers courtesy of OverTheCap.com).