The Kansas City Chiefs are milking the 2020 salary cap for all it is worth.
ESPN’s Field Yates confirmed the latest salary cap numbers from the NFL’s internal report and the Chiefs are about as close as you can get without possibly going over.
Right now, the Chiefs have exactly $177.00 in cap space.
So what exactly can you do with $177 in salary cap space? To give you an idea of how little cap space this is, Chiefs tickets had an average price of just under $200 last season. The front office couldn’t even use the salary cap space they have left to buy a single ticket to watch their own football team play a game.
Official cap space by team (teams 24-32):
24. BAL: 13,513,779
25. GB: 12,966,433
26. MIN: 12,495,443
27. SEA: 11,317,846
28. NO: 9,237,537
29. PIT: 8,667,814
30. ATL: 7,530,188
31. NE: 891,775
32. KC: 177— Field Yates (@FieldYates) March 30, 2020
The cap space situation obviously won’t stay this way because the Chiefs need around $5 million in order to pay their draft picks in the upcoming 2020 NFL draft. However, it’s interesting to see how Brandt Tilis and Chris Shea (the guys who handle the salary cap for the Chiefs) have been able to really stretch the cap space in Kansas City to the limit. I mean if they weren’t careful here they could have easily gone over the salary cap.
The Chiefs haven’t been the most active in free agency, but they’ve been far from inactive. They’ve retained plenty of their own players and brought in some free agents like Antonio Hamilton, Mike Remmers and Jordan Ta’amu. So where do they go from here? It isn’t like they’re without options to create cap space. They could do any of the following to create cap space immediately:
- Extend QB Patrick Mahomes
- Extend/restructure TE Travis Kelce’s contract
- Restructure Tyrann Mathieu’s contract
- Restructure Anthony Hitchens’ contract
- Restructure Eric Fishers’ contract
- Sign DT Chris Jones to a contract extension, eliminating his franchise tag number of $16.1 million.
- Trade/release WR Sammy Watkins, freeing up $14 million in cap space.
- Trade/release OL Laurent Duvernay-Tardif with a post-June 1 designation, saving $6.9 million in cap space.
- Trade/release SS Daniel Sorensen, creating $3.75 million in cap space.
Some sort of move is coming in the future and it’ll help the Chiefs get some salary-cap relief.
At the end of the day, they could always take that $177 and place a bet on themselves to repeat as Super Bowl champions. If they win Super Bowl LV, at +600 odds, that $177 will win $1,062. Personally, I’d use it to buy ship myself some BBQ from Joe’s Kansas City. What do you think the Chiefs should do with $177 in salary cap space? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.
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