After a busy first week of free agency, the Denver Broncos have put a lot of their salary cap space to rest already. As of this writing, Spotrac is reporting the Broncos have $26.98M in salary cap, however, that doesn’t include some of the moves they made. Let’s break things down further here.
Of the Broncos top contracts, two of their trades and their franchise tagged player are in the top six in cap hits now.
- Von Miller - $25.625M (11.98% of cap)
- Kareem Jackson - $14M (6.54% of cap)
- A.J. Bouye - $13.437M (6.28% of cap)
- Ja’Wuan James - $13M (6.08% of cap)
- Jurrell Casey - $11.787M (5.51% of cap)
- Justin Simmons - $11.441M (5.35% of cap)
From there, no player is above 4% of the cap. Before I get into the estimated salary cap now, I wondered how this distribution of cap compared to other AFC West teams. The Kansas City Chiefs had 10 players accounting for more than 4% of their salary cap and not one of those 10 was Patrick Mahomes. The Las Vegas Raiders were a little more frugal with seven players over the 4% mark, which the Los Angeles Chargers also matched.
The one contract that is not currently fully know is the contract signed by Graham Glasgow, so his will likely put the Broncos up to seven themselves. With Spotrac reporting a salary cap of $26.98M, we then have to look at Glasgow’s contract. He was signed to a four-year deal worth $44M and features $26M in guarantees. There is no way to know for sure how that is spread out, so we’ll be conservative and assume the hit will be $11M in the first year - though I would expect it to be lower this first year.
That would peg the Broncos current salary cap situation at $16-17M. Take out another $8-10M for draft picks and the Broncos likely have little room to make any more free agent signings this offseason.
First, they have to begin negotiating with Justin Simmons. He’ll likely end up making north of his current franchise tag of $11.441M. We can assume a couple of million will come off there, then we have the assume extension for Phillip Lindsay. That could end up eating up the rest of the available cap there.
Now if the Broncos do end up making more free agent signings, I think we can safely assume that a new deal for Lindsay isn’t going to end up in the cards. Wouldn’t that be interesting?