As the Pittsburgh Steelers turn their eyes to next season, general manager Kevin Colbert and his staff are going to once again be in a familiar place.
That would be salary cap hell.
Colbert and company have had their backs up against the wall almost every offseason in memory and this upcoming one will be no different.
The good news is that the cap will likely rise to around the $140 million range.
The bad news is that the Steelers will likely already be over that number entering the offseason.
The Steelers will enter the offseason with 38 players under contract already with a total of just over $127 million committed to those 38.
There’s also a bunch of dead money to add to that total, $9.4 million to be exact, with $8.58 of that belonging to LaMarr Woodley’s contract.
Throw in the Steelers cap paybacks and cap rollovers and the number goes up even more.
The Steelers still have to get to a minimum of 51 players though, so if you count the league minimum for each of the 13 open roster spots heading into the offseason, there’s another close to $6 million added.
Add all of that up and the Steelers are already a good $2.5 million over the projected cap.
That’s nothing new to them, but this year it is going to be a bit trickier as they won’t be able to restructure everyone on the roster’s contracts to save money. The reality of the situation is that they only have two players-Antonio Brown and Maurkice Pouncey- that they could do anything substantial with to save money and Pouncey just signed an extension before the season, so that isn’t likely.
Both Ben Roethlisberger and Cameron Heyward should get hefty extensions this offseason, which will lower the initial cap hit for the next couple of seasons.
The Steelers can also save some money by releasing Brett Keisel, Cam Thomas and Lance Moore, which would save about $5 million of cap space.
Troy Polamalu’s contract could also come off the books if the veteran elects to hang them up, which would save the team another $3.75 million against the cap.
Those moves would get the Steelers below the cap line, but not enough to really do anything major in the offseason, especially considering they will have to sign rookies and fill out the rest of the roster in an affordable fashion.
With a defense that needs totally revamped, Colbert is going to have to get very creative in order to do so.
The Steelers have a lot of work to do and not much in terms of a checkbook to get it done.
But it wouldn’t be the offseason if we weren’t talking about salary cap problems.
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