INDIANAPOLIS — Stop me if you've heard this before: the NFL is a business. That means money makes it go around and, in professional football, how teams manage their respective salary cap can either help make or break their season — the Dallas Cowboys being non-exempt from this reality.
With the complete offseason NFL calendar now revealed, and the non-exclusive franchise tag having been applied to Pro Bowl wide receiver George Pickens, the Cowboys must balance filling vacancies on their coaching staff with contract talks on looming in-house free agents.
They can now get to the business of doing the latter after the NFL notified teams of where the 2024 salary cap will be set — a robust figure of $301.2 million, the league announced on Friday.
That number is far-and-away the highest on record, as you can readily see:
- 2019: $188.2 million
- 2020: $198.2 million
- 2021: $182.5 million*
- 2022: $208.2 million
- 2023: $224.8 million
- 2024: $255.4 million
- 2025: $279.2 million
- 2026: $301.2 million
*adjusted for COVID-19 impact
Additionally, per the league: "Add in another $77.6 million in benefits & that's $378.8m per club in player spending."
As for the actual cap itself ($301.2 million) it has, as noted above, gone up year-over-year with the exception of the pandemic-strapped 2020 season that led to a revenue hit impacting the following year.
Having entered the offseason needing to do work to get under the cap ceiling, the Cowboys, there are several ready-made triggers that can, and some will, be pulled to get Dallas deep into the green ahead of free agency.
As it stands, the Cowboys are currently over the cap by $56.1 million, but two things are important to note here:
- That sum includes the $27.3 million cap hit from Pickens' franchise tag.
- More than $131 million can be freed up by the Cowboys via restructures that do not require a player's permission to do (e.g., Dak Precott, Tyler Smith, CeeDee Lamb, Osa Odighizuwa, with $52 million more available via additional restructures).
- Cap space can also be freed up for 2026 by extending players early, such as Kenny Clark and Quinnen Williams, to lower their respective cap hits — to the tune of a combined $31 million — while simultaneously locking them in for the future.
And, of course, if the Cowboys strike a longterm deal with Pickens before the NFL deadline to do so in mid-July, his $27.3 million franchise tag hit will be massively reduced, and the sooner the better, in the realm of freeing up that cash to spend for early waves of free agency.
"We want to, while Dak is playing the game and got it down the way he's got it, to get out here, and do better than what we did this year," So, a combination of those things gives us the incentive to, dare I say it? Bust the budget — to try to get something done now? Yes. OK? Yes. We'll do some dramatic things."
There's a reason by executive vice president and director of player personnel noted the Cowboys "can do everything we need to do" even with Pickens' tag applied, and why owner and general manager Jerry Jones continuously states nothing about cap space will prevent Dallas from striking a deal with Pickens or carrying the tag if they need to, without impacting their free agency plans in one way or the other.
The elder Jones went as far as saying the Cowboys "have incentive to bust the budget" this offseason with the goal of "trying to get something done now", some "dramatic things" to try and end the thirty-year Super Bowl drought.
With the number now officially set, the accounting can truly begin in Dallas.
