The Kansas City Chiefs are feeling better about their salary cap situation ahead of the 2020 NFL Draft. They no longer are tightly pressed against the cap ceiling with a remaining balance of $177.
According to the NFLPA’s public salary cap report, the Chiefs have $1.475 million in salary-cap space. The above figure includes all of the recent free-agent contracts such as TE Ricky Seals-Jones and RB DeAndre Washington. Unless the Chiefs make another move ahead of the draft, there should be no changes to this figure. There are only two teams with less salary cap space, the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots.
OverTheCap projects that Kansas City will need $5.1 million in salary-cap space to sign their rookie draft class. That figure doesn’t include going after undrafted free agents following the draft. While it seems to the naked eye that the Chiefs need to create some more cap space ahead of the draft, general manager Brett Veach challenged that notion during his pre-draft press conference.
“…As to where we are cap-wise, obviously some of the sites the fans use, they’re good sites, but they are not always accurate. They’re close, but it takes anywhere from 3-5 million to sign picks and depending on what you look at, you may say, ‘Well shoot, they don’t have enough to sign a draft prospect.’ The cap is flexible and what we are able to do is flexible. There is an array of moving parts that we feel confident in. As far as doing some business from here to the season, or signing our draft picks, we have a plan that we’ve been working off of all along and we feel confident in that. The numbers may say one thing, there are just so many different things that you can do to get yourself to where you need to be. It’s hard, unless you’re sitting in our rooms here to know what we are thinking, but suffice to say that we are aware of what it costs to sign our draft picks.”
The Chiefs are following their blueprint and have a plan they’re enacting this offseason as related to the salary cap. Veach seems to feel confident that Kansas City has a number of ways to create cap space and be financially flexible heading into the draft. If the team has the need to move up and draft a player at a higher-priced draft slot or move back and add an extra contract or two to this draft class, they’ll be prepared to account for that cost against the salary cap.
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