The Bills have made some recent roster moves and have a bunch more en route. On Saturday at 4 p.m., it’s roster cut-down day in the NFL. The Bills will trim their crew of players from 80 to the traditional 53 guys they’ll head into the 2020 regular season with.
While we have those cuts and a full 16-game schedule this year before we get into the 2021 salary cap, keeping an eye on the future is a smart play for the Bills… and anyone rooting for a football team. That’s the case each year, but especially now due to COVID-19.
Because of the ongoing pandemic, fans won’t be allowed at games in Buffalo. No where in the league is anticipating full crowds when the upcoming season starts and we might not even get any at all, period. Truthfully we don’t know what’s going to happen with butts getting into seats.
And because of that, we’ll preface the 2021 salary cap discussion with this: We also don’t know what’s going to happen with it, so don’t panic.
Earlier this offseason, it was announced that the NFL and NFLPA agreed to a salary cap “floor” of sorts for 2021. That number is $175 million, a drop from 2020’s $198.2M salary cap. Not only is that in itself a big drop, each season prior to COVID-19, the cap has only gone up and up, typically increasing about 10 percent per year.
Again, this is not set in stone, but the Bills currently are not in a pretty position if this $175M figure holds. According to Spotrac, the Bills’ current forecast 2021 salary number is currently $6.4M over that floor.
While perhaps alarming, we’re here to tell you to not get overly worked up over this just yet.
As mentioned, the Bills are going to finish trimming their roster this week. This number from Spotrac is the team’s projected salary cap figure with their top-51 cap hits. That alone could change in the coming days.
But there’s many moving factors here such as potential salary cap space that’s carried over, how much revenue is generated from fans getting in venues throughout the season causing that $175M number to increase, and more.
Again, $175M is only the lowest it could possibly go. There’s a chance… probably a good one… that this number increases.
And there’s little reason to worry because the Bills are not even close to being in the worst case scenario if this unfolds. In this 2021 ranking, the Bills are one of at least 10 teams in the NFL projected to currently be over next year’s cap floor of $175M. Some of the teams that have much bleaker outlooks are the Eagles and Saints, who are put at $90.1M and $77.8M over the 2021 floor, respectively, per Spotrac.
It could be worse for the Bills, but this simply just shows that the team and players such as linebacker Matt Milano and cornerback Tre’Davious White, who are looking to be locked up to extensions, just have to kind of… wait things out. At least Dion Dawkins got his.
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