How the salary cap change affects the Saints

The salary cap went up $30 million but how does it help New Orleans?

Per Jonathan Jones, an NFL insider for CBS, the salary cap is expected to increase by around $30 million. Next year’s salary cap is to be set at $255.4 million.

Teams across the league were projecting the next salary cap to be somewhere around $242-$245 million. This makes the increase $10 million higher than expected, which helps a lot of teams, especially the New Orleans Saints. Let’s break down why.

New Orleans was around $80 million over the cap before this increase. They had already begun their annual contract restructures, with the restructuring of center Eric McCoy’s and quarterback Derek Carr’s. The cap strategy under General Manager Mickey Loomis for the Saints has traditionally been to push the money down the road, with the expectation that the cap will be increasing each season. Covid-19 put a pause on that, as it caused the growth to stagnate, eventually leading to the 2021 season, where the cap actually went down by $16 million.

The Saints should now be somewhere in the realm of $40 million over the cap, significantly shortening the amount of moves that the front office and GM Mickey Loomis would have to make to get compliant.