What the NFL’s 2024 salary-cap increase means for the Seahawks
SEATTLE – The good news for the Seahawks: They learned Friday that the NFL salary cap for 2024 will be a bit higher than expected.
The bad news: The other 31 NFL teams found out the same thing.
In other words, the news that the cap had been set at $255.4 million for the 2024 season – a $30.6 million jump from 2023 and the largest one-year increase in NFL history – won’t help the Seahawks more than any other team.
Mostly it will help players, especially those about to hit free agency who should have more bargaining power.
As Jason Fitzgerald of OvertheCap.com wrote, “the relative buying power of each team remains the same.”
The league explained the cap rise in a statement:
“The unprecedented $30 million increase per club in this year’s Salary Cap is the result of the full repayment of all amounts advanced by the clubs and deferred by the players during the COVID pandemic as well as an extraordinary increase in media revenue for the 2024 season.”
The Seahawks had been projected as being about $400,000 under the cap following Thursday’s news that they had restructured quarterback Geno Smith’s contract to create $4.8 million in cap space. That was based on an estimate of what the cap might be – most estimates had been that it would be in the $242 million range given its rate of increase the previous year (it had risen from $208.2 million in 2022 to last year’s $224.8 million).
Following Friday’s news, they were projected as having $12.9 million in available cap space and $7.8 million in effective cap space.
Effective cap space considers money needed to pay draft picks and having at least 51 players on the roster. The Seahawks have just 49 under contract.
Teams must be at or under the cap when the new league year begins March 13, with the number calculated using the top 51 salaries on each team’s roster.
The added cap space means the Seahawks don’t have to make more moves to get cap compliant.
But the cap going up equally for everyone means they are still near the bottom when it comes to money to spend.
The Seahawks are 22nd in available overall cap space and effective cap space.
Washington tops the list in both with $87 million in overall cap space and $75 million in effective cap space. Seventeen teams have $32 million or more in overall cap space.
That means the Seahawks will have ample competition for free agents when the negotiating period begins March 11. They are still likely to make moves to create cap room.
Some of those could come next week when president of football operations John Schneider and the rest of the personnel department descend on Indianapolis for the annual NFL combine.
Along with its main purpose of giving teams a chance to test, scout and interview potential draft picks, the combine usually serves as the time when teams begin meeting with agents of pending free agents. Each side gets a sense of players’ realistic markets.
One of the Seahawks’ biggest decisions figures to revolve around safety Jamal Adams, as there continues to be speculation that they could cut him to create cap space.
Cutting Adams would create $7.3 million in cap space with the Seahawks taking a $19.5 million dead-cap hit (meaning money they have paid Adams that has to be accounted for even if he is no longer playing for them).
Or they could cut Adams but declare him a post-June 1 release. That would increase the savings to $16.5 million while decreasing the dead-cap hit to $10.4 million. But it means they can’t make use of that cap space until after June 1.
The cap rise could make it easier for the Seahawks to swallow the dead-cap hit. It also could be argued that the cap increase makes it easier to fit in his $26.9 million hit for 2024 – the largest on the team after Smith’s restructure dropped his number to $26.4 million.
Adams’ salary had been estimated as potentially taking up 10.87% of the cap under the old number but fell to 10.3% with Friday’s news.
Pro Football Focus wrote this week that “the writing seems on the wall” that Adams will be released.
Fitzgerald wrote that the higher-than-anticipated rise in the cap could mean an extended feeling-out period at the combine as teams and agents each try to get a sense of the true market for players at each position.
“The interesting thing will be how much does this change the asking prices of players in free agency,” he wrote. “In the past the increase in the cap has not had that kind of spike in wages, at least immediately. Most positions at the top do not increase at a significantly greater rate than the salary cap (normally those on the lower end see big jumps and then it catches up to the top), but we have also never seen a jump like this.”
Fitzgerald also noted that the setting of the cap arrived earlier. It usually is set closer to the start of the new league year, which this year is March 13.
“My guess would be because the number was going to be so large the league wanted to get ahead of this before the combine so contract discussions can focus on using the right numbers rather than working with lower figures and having it blow up in everyone’s face a week later and rendering a lot of the work pointless,” he wrote.
He wrote that if teams stick to offers based on last year’s number that “it may be a year where the agents and teams clash more over value. This also should make the franchise players really dig in on holding firm on signing an extension since there is little benefit to signing now unless the team is going to really make a great offer. So it might make for a crazy couple of weeks.”
The cap is based on a formula in which players receive 48% of league revenues.