Salary cap rises $11M to $188.2M

Super Bowl LII hero Graham agrees to remain with Eagles.

The NFL’s salary cap will jump $11 million this season to $188.2 million.

In the ninth year of the 10-year labor agreement, the cap moves up from $177.2 million. It has increased in every year of the contract, with the biggest move in 2015 to 2016, when it went up by just less than $12 million.

This is the third year out of four in which clubs must reach 89 percent in cash spending, and the NFL Players Association said Friday that four teams are under that threshold: Dallas, Buffalo, Indianapolis and Houston.

League expenditures for benefits are $40.5 million per team. Add that to the salary cap number and each club’s player costs are more than $228 million.

Benefits includes pension payments to former players; the Bell/Rozelle retirement and disability plan for active players; annuities and 401 (k) plans; health care; injury protection and severance; veteran performance-based pay; a separate pool of performance-based pay that’s essentially a cash bonus to players who outperform their contracts.

With the NFL’s revenues at more than $14 billion and every team worth at least $1.6 billion (Buffalo), with a high of about $5 billion (Dallas), it’s hardly a surprise how high the cap has gone. In the first year of the current CBA, reached after a lockout of the players from MarchJuly 2011, the cap was $120 million. It has increased by at least $10 million every year since 2014, when it went up to $133 million from $123 million.

There should be plenty of money available to free agents when the league’s business year begins March

13. On average, teams have about $35 million in space after making offseason moves, with more certain to come.

Two clubs, Philadelphia and Jacksonville, still must make moves to get under the cap. Agents for players can begin negotiating freeagent deals with teams March 11, but can’t officially close them before 4 p.m. March 13.

■ Free-agent defensive lineman David Irving has been suspended indefinitely for violating the NFL’s substance-abuse policy. Irving was suspended the first four games of each of the past two seasons with the Cowboys. The 25-year-old is set to be an unrestricted free agent after playing just two games on a one-year contract as a restricted free agent in 2018, his fourth year with Dallas.

■ The Eagles and defensive end Brandon Graham agreed to a three-year contract extension, preventing the team’s longest-tenured defensive player from testing free agency. Graham had just four sacks last season after a career-high 9½ in 2017, including a strip-sack on Tom Brady to secure Philadelphia’s 41-33 victory over New England in the Super Bowl in February 2018.

■ The Ravens waived former starting running back Alex Collins on Friday, hours after he was arrested following a morning car crash in Owings Mills, Md. Baltimore County police responded to a report of a car that had crashed into a tree approximately a mile from the team facility. Collins, 24, was arrested, but the charges against him were not immediately available.

DOUG MILLS / THE NEW YORK TIMES 2016 His sport isn’t just eating and muscle building. Joe Kovacs (seen during his silver-medal performance at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016) says of his technique: “When the ball comes out, the angle and velocity is just a physics problem. If you can put the velocity behind it, you’re going to have a good throw.”