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Thanks to the NFL's most recent television deal, very few teams have had trouble in recent years getting under the salary cap. But it should become even easier in 2009 now that the league has announced that the cap will be $127 million this year, $4 million higher than what was expected.The teams had been told to expect the cap to rise to $123 million, up from $116.2 million in 2008. That was already a big enough bump that most teams were millions under the cap. Even before the recent wave of cuts and Brett Favre's retirement, only six teams had more than $120 million in cap commitments. Now, nearly every team in the league will have millions to spend even after setting aside money for their draft picks. In the case of the Chiefs, they have more than $40 million in cap room.But there is one problem with this scenario--there are very few players on the free agent market worth spending money on. Albert Haynesworth's history of injuries and not reaching his potential until his contract year scares teams. Ray Lewis is on the downside of his career. Kurt Warner doesn't want to leave Arizona. Many of the potential top free agents, like Julius Peppers, Jordan Gross, Vernon Carey, Brandon Jacobs, Matt Cassel and Nnamdi Asomugha were all locked up or franchised before free agency begins.
So what we will have is a free agency period where almost every team has between $10 million and $40 million in cap room, but very few players worth spending it on. Add in the uncertainty of the expiring Collective Bargaining Agreement and we're likely to see a few seemingly insane contract amounts (like Asomugha's) combined with plenty of teams sitting on their cap room.
The other likely effect is plenty of grumbling from veterans locked into long-term deals. The salary cap has grown nearly 50 percent since 2005 (when the cap was at $85.5 million). So pretty much anyone who signed a long-term deal in 2005 or 2006 has seen what looked like a great contract at the time seem pretty paltry compared to the numbers being thrown out for the 2009 class of free agents.
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