With the Bye Week a look at the 2012 season (cap, FA, Draft)

Since we are on the bye week I thought I bring up a post about our position for salary cap, FA's and players that are nearing the end of their contracts.  Now for those that do know with the new CBA agreement the NFL has a minimal salary that increase quite a bit.  According to the last CBA proposal that was ratified the players get 15,000 more per year with step increases after the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, and 10th years playing.  The actual amounts are the following:

Year	R	2nd	3rd	4th-6th	7th-9th	10th
2011	$375,000	$450,000	$600,000	$685,000	$810,000	$910,000
2012	$390,000	$465,000	$615,000	$700,000	$825,000	$925,000
2013	$405,000	$480,000	$630,000	$715,000	$840,000	$940,000
2014	$420,000	$495,000	$645,000	$730,000	$855,000	$955,000

 

Which I copied from a steelers blog site.  Now that you know lets start work on the salary cap after the jump.

The salary cap has increase about 7 million per year under the old CBA.  Now to figure out what the new cap number will be will take some time.  However I do let you know how I came up with the figures.  First is the TV Contracts are on wiki and with the current agreement at 55 percent and the other revenue at 45 and 40 percent of revenue I can back track it.  The difficult part will be is to find what the revenue was setup with the old agreement.  Now as such there is a few items I found out about.  What the current CBA says is the cap can only be 48 percent of the total revenue.  An additional .5 percent after 2014.  So that means my mega number I been saying with the TV contracts could be lessened.  In any case the league is averaging 175.5 million before TV per team that gets split 40 and 45 percent depending on the type of revenue.  Now given all of the info of benefits makes the final partial split at 43% of other revenue.  Given that money increase by 7 million the first 2 years of the last CBA and then 12 the next year there is some numbers to gleen from that.  That number would be the percentage of rise in income each year in non TV money.  Since TV money is stationary and does not rise each year it helps in finding that 43 percent number.  From what I found the non TV money rises roughly 6 to 9 percent a year.  Since the down turn in the economy I am betting on a 6 percent increase in non TV revenue for next year.  Now here comes some more numbers to get you guys going crazy.  First is the 2012 cap number is actually a combination of both the 48 of total revenue and the amount of increase in total non TV revenue.  With the numbers given of 9.4 billion at the time of the lockout and simple math puts that number closer to 9.5 billion its easy to see that this year they did not pay attention to the 48 percent rule.  As a result TV revenue is so high that the non TV money is not keeping up with the 48 percent.  What that means is that although a 6 percent increase in non TV money will increase the cap it will not be enough to give more cap space to the teams.  As a result the total cap for 2012 after a WHOLE BUNCH of formulas and more than enough words to fill a Tom Clancy novel it will be around 146 million.  With the cost of benefits going up by the ROI the cap for player salaries will be around 123,286,000.  That is actually lower than the current Lions cap however there is some play in the numbers as they Lions have 3 million in possible loans.  The loan number would be an additional 1.5 million for next year cap to make it 124,786,000.   

Now after 680 some words to explain the cap for next year lets look at the funner side of Free Agents.  Currently we have 34 players signed for next year.  We need to have 53 players on our rooster however only the top 51 players count for the cap.  Now getting to the 53 we have the draft as well.  Now in most drafts we get 7 picks and the the 2012 draft we shall have 7 picks as well.  We have not traded away any picks in the draft and are receiving a pick from Seattle from LY pre-cut Mayhewing of Seattle for a "late round pick".  Given that we ARE losing a 6th rounder because of some B.S. the league came up with I figure we have picks in round 1 to 5 with 2 in the 7th.  As a result I figure we at best can get 5 players next year in the draft that will get on the rooster.  I highly doubt we will see any moves this year but never say never.  I think though for our purposes we should go with 4 picks.  As a result that lessens our need for signings to just 15 players.  I should also mention that only our #1 and #2 rounders will count for the cap unless we sign a UDFA. 

Here is a list of Unrestricted Free Agents for 2012. 

QB's - Drew Stanton

RB's - Jerome Harrison and Maurice Morris

WR's - Rashied Davis and Maurice Stovall

TE's - NONE yeah! :D

OL's - Jeff Backus, Corey Hillard, and Dylan Gandy

DL's - Cliff Avril and Andre Fluellen

LB's - Stephen Tulloch, Bobby Carpenter, and Isaiah Ekejiuba

DB's - Eric Wright, Brandon McDonald, Vincent Fuller, and Erik Coleman

LS - Don Mulbach

As for Restricted Free Agents for 2012 we have the following players

RB's - Eldra Buckley and Stefan Logan

DL's - Sammie Lee Hill

LB's - Ashley Palmer and DeAndre Levy

I am not sure who is likely to stay or not but that is the list of players.  We will resign roughly 15 of the 25 players but I think most will get resigned but have to battle for rooster spots with rookies and others.  I will say this though Mulbach, Logan, Levy, Backus, Avril, Carpenter, Tulloch, Wright, and Morris are ones that if resigned will get to be on the rooster.  Which is 9 of the 15 spots available.  Now I know some will say what about Drew I think there is a spot for him if he wants it but the rash of bad and good QB play he might get the option of being a number 2 somewhere.  I think he would like to stay here in the D however a triple in salary has to be big temptation. 

The deal with the salary cap above and this list is also the one little aspect of cap space.  Currently the 34 players are taking 102 million dollars.  Given the comment above about player minimals I would expect to see the 2 rookies get about 2 million combined.  That leaves only roughly 20 Million to sign the 15 players we need.  Now there is some space that can be moved around though.  With moving you need to first look at players who are at the end of their contract and also have high cap hits for the year.  First up is Calvin Johnson and his hit for next year is 15.6 million and is in his last year.  That would be good to do an extension and lessen that by 5 million or so but do a 30 percent increase (max the league allows) in 2014.   Kyle Vandenbosch is next up and with a 6.7 owed this year and 6.3 in 2013 could be reduced by a million or so and extended to say 2015.  Next up would be Corey Williams who is due 5 million and is in his last year.  Again a million reduction and extension to 2015 would be a solid answer.  After that we are looking at minor amounts.  Houston is at 4 million and a 500k reduction and extension for his last year would be good.  Hansen could be another bet at 3.2 and in his last year would be a good way to tie him up for another 2 more years.  Outside of that you really have to start to decide if you even want to keep some players or not.  We have a few players that have one or two years left with some Signing Bonuses but overall they are over the 2 million threshold I consider renegotiable for extensions to reduce salaries.  The thing is that we are at best looking at maybe 10 million pinched by extensions but closer to say 5 to 6 million.  That would give us around 25 million for those 15 players.  That is still pretty tough to accomplish but I think if they get the 10 million by extensions they could easily accomplish the 15 players with 30 million.