Up until this point, so much of where each team in the NFL was going to stand against the salary cap was nothing more than educated guesswork. And their perceived spending power was more of the same — we knew which teams would have the most, but the specific numbers have escaped all until the opportunity to get some specific numbers presented itself. In most seasons, those numbers would have been well established by now. But this is not most seasons.
Fortunately, the NFL released the memo yesterday to formalize the standard cap ceiling for 2021; giving each team $182.5M in credit for salaries and cap charges. But that dollar amount isn’t the final spending figure for teams — because NFL franchises are afforded the opportunity to roll over unused cap from previous seasons. So a team that had $10M in unused cap at the end of the 2020 season would have a “personalized” cap ceiling of $192.5M instead of the standard figure of $182.5M across the league.
So, with that in mind, where do the Miami Dolphins stand entering this pivotal offseason? What is their personalized cap ceiling when accounting for cap power to roll over from 2020?
According to Spotrac, Miami’s individual cap ceiling for 2021 checks in at $197M.
https://twitter.com/spotrac/status/1369662880694611968
Only 8 teams across the league will have a higher personalized cap ceiling, meaning Miami has plenty of wiggle room relative to some of the other teams across the league. But the Dolphins are presumably not content with what they have to work with from a spending power perspective, as the team made official yesterday their split with veteran linebacker Kyle Van Noy to free up significant amounts of cap space.
Depending on how the Dolphins classify Van Noy’s termination, he will have cleared either just under $10M in cap space or just over $12M in cap space for 2021. That move, plus whatever else Miami cooks up between now and next Wednesday, sets the table for the Dolphins to come out swinging in free agency and test the limits of their personalized $197M cap ceiling.