By the #'s: We can sign our RFA's and bring in a couple more

But... the signing bonuses required could have Mr. B shaking his head in the no-no direction.

The salary cap is a fluid and complex concept. It can, and often is, manipulated to meet goals, both short term and long term. Salary cap standings and cash being spent won’t necessarily see eye to eye. And without a forensic accountant, attempting to discern where the Broncos stand based on past salary cap numbers is nearly impossible. It would require too many opinions and variables, and that would undermine the results.

The goal here is to understand how much actual cash we already have committed to current players next year. This should give us a very good idea of how much we’ll be asking Mr. Bowlen to come out of pocket with this year. Additionally, by using each players total contract amount and dividing by years in that contract, we should be able to get an idea of how the average expenditures meet up with this upcoming 2010 season.

The warning here, is that it still requires some interpretation and additional thinking. You shouldn’t look at our committed cash flow and assume we’ve got a boat load left to spend. You should take into account 2010 draft choices, and a lot of free agents that won’t be cheap.

The chart after the jump is a list of salaries due to each player next year, those numbers in the "Out of Pocket 2010 Salary" column are very accurate. Those are the numbers that a player can expect on his actual paycheck. They won't change unless we restructure a players contract (e.g. Champ Bailey) The "Pro-Rated 2010 Salary" column, on the other hand, is simply the overall contract amount (including bonuses) averaged out equally per year for the life of the contract. This basically serves as the "cap" number, but without all the manipulations.

Free Agents on their way out: 

The following are some free agents without contract commitments. I've split them into two groups. This first group is those that I see as likely to leave. Feel free to argue my judgments here as I didn't take a lot of time with this specifc aspect. For example, I've got two safety's and a cb being shown the door. Obviously, that means we would need to add depth. Perhaps you would keep a couple of them. But again, my attempt here was to simplify by weeding out some of these guys; feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Free Agents we would LIKE to keep:

This is basically a list of the medium to high profile players that we would like to resign or tender. For the purposes of this exercise, I didn't tender any of them. I plugged in some numbers of what they might cost per year if we extended them. AND REMEMBER:  This doesn't account for the immediate wallet hurt from the signing bonuses, etc.. Anyway, these numbers are absolute guesses, as I only briefly looked at what a couple similar guys have been making, then threw in a number. Again, feel free to disagree, as I'm not attached to the following projections. 

 So in essence, we're saying that IF these free agents were signed to contracts that average the amount listed per year, we would now basically have a very fluid "cap" number of about $114M. That number is sort of what we would be paying all of our players on average per year. We've included all of our committed players, our projected resigns, and our draft picks. Not too bad, really. For reference purposes, the 2009 cap floor was $108M; the ceiling was $128M. It also might be of use to know that the cap ceiling jumped by $12M last year, meaning if there had been a cap this year we could likely conclude that the cap ceiling would be at least $135M.

For what it's worth, the actual cash money Denver spent last year in salaries was $102M. Unfortunately, I think it would be very difficult to project 2010's cash flows to include draft picks and resignings due to the large and unpredictable bonuses that our first draft picks, BM, Doom, and some others will likely have.

The cash part is the scary part, IMO. We look to be fairly ok to sign our RFA's and add some from outside... from an average salary aspect. But with signing bonuses looming, Mr. B's wallet is going to get hard in the short term, if he does indeed sign all these guys.

The point, though, is that a salary burden or "fake cap" number of $114M doesn't really look too high.

Please bear in mind these projections are only meant to sort of help with all the mocks and questions we've all been having about who we can afford. It's just in fun and not really meant to be balls on. I'm sure I've forgotten somebody on the depth chart or something like that. And most importatnly, we still have no idea how much Bowlen is willing to spend this year. And that's the big question.

Feel free to mention any mistakes/corrections so that I can keep the chart as correct as possible. It may come in handy at some point.

** Salary and contract sources from USA Today and Rotoworld. Also, thanks to Kaptain Kirk for some links!