New NFL salary cap gives the Seattle Seahawks plenty of room to work

The league office has finally set the NFL salary cap for the 2015 season. It took them long enough, as we’re already only a week away from the start of free agency. At least we had an idea of what it was going to be before today.

Of course, each team also gets to roll over any unused cap space from the year before. That means that every team has their own unique salary cap that changes every year. Fun huh?

Here’s the Current salary cap situation for the Seahawks:

Adjusted cap: $148.26 million

Current 2015 cap charges: $123.994 million

2015 cap space: $24.266 million

Before you start to worry that a Russell Wilson extension is going to eat up all that cap space, it won’t. Wilson is going to get a huge new contract, but most of the cap hit won’t phase in until the 2nd year of the deal.

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Even if Wilson’s 2015 compensation hits the $26 million mark, his cap number isn’t likely to be above $6 million this year. Explaining how that works is a topic for another article. Hopefully I can get to that topic in the next day or so.

Wilson, Wagner, and a raise for Marshawn Lynch will only combine to use up around $10 million of that available cap space. That leaves them with just over $14 million in cap room left to work.

Because they don’t pick until the end of first round in the draft, they don’t need much in the way of cap space for rookies either. Last season’s 31st overall pick, Bradley Roby of Denver, only counted $1.2 million against the cap. The rest of the picks don’t make more than the guys they replace, creating no effective change in the cap situation.

That means that the Seahawks have plenty of room to work. While $13 million in usable cap space might be nothing compared to the $68 million Raiders have, it is still significant. They will be able to make some noise once the market opens up next week.

I wouldn’t expect them to make a big name signing like Ndamukong Suh or Julius Thomas. Doing so will eat up too much of the available cap space on one player. They simply have more needs that needs to be addressed. Then again, Schneider and Carroll have swung for the fences in the past, so perhaps they’ll surprise us by going so again.

Instead, the Seahawks are in a position to mine the free agent market for second-tier talent. Players like cornerback Chris Culliver, tight end Lance Kendricks, and edge-rusher Brian Orakpo are all the type of players who would fit this description. The Seahawks have the cap room to add three to five of these players without having to create any new cap room to do so.

Overall, the key point here is that the Seahawks have room with which to work. The team has done very well managing their salary cap over the last few seasons, and they find themselves in a very good spot because of it.