The Pittsburgh Steelers went on a spending spree during the first week of free agency. In an unnormal off-season that saw the Steelers start with around $27 million in cap room, they dished out contracts that will pay those players a combined $80+ million. I don't think anyone saw that coming from this team.
Now with that, the question on everyone's mind is how much cap space do the Steelers have left?
The answer? Not a lot.
The two most popular websites to track salary cap information are OverTheCap.com and Spotrac.com. OTC lists the Steelers as having $21,061,376 in cap space, and Spotrac shows $20,459,217. Those numbers are incorrect. And they're incorrect only because the contract details for several Steelers aren't available yet. Now if you're screaming that the Steelers released Zach Banner, and Joe Schobert, yes, they did -- and that is already reflected on those websites.
Now let me show you why those sites aren't right... yet.
For instance, if you scroll down to the bottom of Spotrac, you'll see these newly signed, or re-signed players listed with no salary figure:
OTC is missing the same four players. So let's take a look at what we know in regards to their contracts.
Mitchell Trubisky - $14 million base value over two years with incentives that could raise it to $27 million. There's a variety of different things teams can do with base salaries to keep them low. But with shorter contracts, you can't back load or spread them out. For the sake of this article, let's just place Trubisky's cap hit at $5 million.
Mason Cole - Cole signed a three-year contract worth $15.75 million, with $11 million in the first two seasons. So that $11 million has to be split up between the first two seasons. His cap hit can vary as mentioned with Trubisky, so let's caution on the low side again. We will say he costs $3.5 million against the 2022 cap.
Ahkello Witherspoon - His contract was two years for $8 million. The exact same as fellow cornerback Levi Wallace. If we use the same numbers as Wallace, Witherspoon will count $2.9 million against the salary cap in 2022.
Montravius Adams - Adams' deal was two years for $5 million. Taking a guess, but with his limited time with the team, I'm guessing they put more money in year two in case they'd like to move on from him after 2022. So let's say he counts $1.25 million against the 2022 cap.
Adding together those projections, it comes to $12.65 million. Now because only the top 51 players count towards the salary cap, you'd have to substract the contracts for the bottom four players. That would be about $3.5 million.
So in the end, the Steelers have roughly $9.15 million less than Spotrac, or OTC are reporting. That puts them around $12 million in cap room, but they need roughly $8 million to sign their rookie class.
If they want to make any more deals, they're going to have to restructure some contracts. That could be very easily done with Cam Heyward, and TJ Watt. So keep an eye on some movement from that front. Spotrac and OTC should update sometime in the next few days, so keep an eye out.
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