NFL salary cap set at $182.5M, down $15.7M from last season

The NFL’s salary cap for the 2021 season will be $182.5 million, sources confirmed to the Daily News on Wednesday morning.

This is a $15.7 million drop from the league’s $198.2 million cap in 2020.

The cap is decreasing for just the second time ever due to revenue shortfalls during the COVID-19 pandemic, created by numerous factors, particularly the absence or limited attendance of fans at the NFL’s 30 stadiums.

The only other time the cap ever has gone down was the 2011 NFL lockout season. It had increased by $10 million or more for seven straight years prior to this spring.

Last spring, the league and NFL players’ union anticipated this revenue shortage in collective bargaining negotiations and agreed to a $175 million salary cap “floor” for the 2021 season regardless of how much money was lost in 2020.

Then they recently increased that floor to $180 million in talks with the league, which has been busy negotiating lucrative new television contracts that are projected to send the cap soaring back upwards in future years.

NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith told players in a Tuesday memo that the 2021 cap “would have been tens of millions below the current negotiated floor of $180 million” if the cap had been calculated normally with no floor in place.

The union “negotiated the spread” of the NFL’s immediate shortfalls “over three seasons to protect our membership from drastic salary reductions,” instead of absorbing those losses and consequences all in one year.

So if this year’s cap would have been around a reported $160 million based on the normal revenue projections, the NFL and union will have to borrow the $22.5 million difference between that number and the $182.5 million cap in 2021 against future years.

But the league and union are confident they’ll see growth in 2022 and beyond due mainly to the new TV deals and fans’ return to stadiums.

“With the expected increases in broadcast revenues, a belief that our stadiums can be full again in the fall as our nation resumes to normal and other new sources of revenue, our expectation is to have cap growth again in the coming years,” Smith wrote to players on Tuesday.

Already, starting March 1, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy began allowing fans back in MetLife Stadium at 15% capacity for all events. And his hope is that positive health numbers in future months will mean that “the number of people allowed into MetLife Stadium will steadily increase.”

On Tuesday, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced that the state is allowing 50% capacity at sporting venues starting on Friday, good news for the Baltimore Ravens and Washington Football Team.

The NFL also is knee-deep in negotiations that are projected to infuse billions back into the nation’s most popular sport, after successfully completing the 2020 season during the pandemic against long odds.

Despite reports of widespread uncertainty in the NFL about the final salary cap number, the Giants and several other teams were projecting the cap to fall to exactly this range. So Wednesday’s number did not catch them off-guard.

Some clubs were working with $182 million as the number. Others were working with a range of $181183 million. But they’ve had a good idea of where the cap was going to land at least since mid-February, so they’ve had a plan in place for the $182.5 million number that became official on Wednesday.

Teams still wanted to know the specific number sooner than later with the free agent negotiating window set to open next Monday. The upcoming year’s salary cap is also part of a complex formula to calculate franchise tag amounts each year, so those 2021 tag tender numbers weren’t final until Wednesday’s number came out.

The $182.5 million cap number doesn’t impact Leonard Williams’ franchise tag tender with the Giants, however. That stays the same at $19.35 million, because a player on the tag receives 120% of his previous year’s salary or the tag tender for his position, whichever is higher.

Williams made $16.126 million on the tag last season, so 120% of that is $19.35 million, higher than the $13.8 million tag tender for defensive tackles set on Wednesday.