NFL Salary Cap Spike, Travis Kelce's mysterious outrage, EA's College Football return, Soccer referees locked out, and much more. All explained in today's Sunday 7!

Happy Sunday…

Welcome to the new platform!

I hope everyone had a great week and is getting through February, the shortest month of the year always seems like the longest.

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On to this week’s Sunday Seven (actually Sunday Nine, but who’s counting)… 

1. What I’m thinking about the record increase in the NFL Salary Cap…

The NFL announced a 2024 salary cap of $255 million, a healthy increase of 13.4% above the 2023 cap of $224 million. The league is now past the relatively small 6-7% increases in the immediate years after the 2020 Covid year, and this is what we have been expecting from the cap. It is good news for both players and teams that are tight against the cap.

Brandt’s Stance: A couple of caveats go along with this record-setting increase. First, the natural maturation process of player contracts can soak up most cap increases, even this year. Teams usually have 10-25 players with contract increases at or around $1 million per year, some at increases up to $3-5 million per year. The increases in contracts alone can eat up most or all of the cap increases.

Also, NFL teams receive almost $400 million as their disbursement from the league, $150 million more than the $255 million player cap. That is for shared national revenues for media, licensing, sponsorships, etc., and doesn’t even include any local revenue earned. Thus, even with a healthy salary cap, the owners still have a much better deal.

Perhaps the strong cap increase will lessen the number of cap ‘push-outs,’ restructures where teams convert large salaries into prorated signing bonuses in order to defer cap pain. The Saints, as per their normal mode of operations, already pushed out $23 million of cap room on Derek Carr’s contract. Maybe there will be fewer push-outs this year, it’s a mode of cap management that this former cap manager does not like.

Again, it doesn’t take a salary cap wizard to move cap to future years; you could do that. It takes a cap wizard to put the team in position to not have to do that.

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