Update On How The Rookies Affect The Salary Cap For 2015
The Seattle Seahawks made a big trade on the second day of the NFL draft. It cut their total draft picks down from from eleven to just eight, but the jump up into the early portion of the third round actually led to an increase in salary cap expenditures for the 2015 season.
About six weeks ago I wrote an article explaining how much cap space the rookies would take up in 2015. Here is an update now that we only had eight selections, and moved up to draft Tyler Lockett.
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As of right now we have only signed six of our eight draft picks. Only Frank Clark and Tyler Lockett are unsigned so I’m going to use projections for them courtesy of spotrac.com. Here is a look at each draft pick and salary they will replace in the top 51.
[table id=59 /]
Only our first four draft picks are going to make it to the top 51. The remaining four draft picks will only count the pro-ration of their signing bonus towards the off-season salary cap. There numbers look like this:
[table id=60 /]
The highest salary cap hit of the last four draft picks is Tye Smith at $476,563. His cap hit would have to be higher than $510,000 to crack the top 51. If you add the bottom four lines together you get a number of $100,178. Then do the same for the previous table and you get a number of $334,380. Add them together and you get a cap increase of $434,558.
Our original projection had the rookie cap increase at $410,814, a difference of $23,744. We ended up with only eight draft picks instead of eleven but the trade up from #95 to #69 was high enough to increase it just a bit.
In all not much cap space used by our 2015 rookie class. Go Hawks!
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