Cap Space for teams (sorted in alphabetical order): as of March 3, 2013
•The new league year and free agency begin on 12:00 AM, Tuesday, March 12th--that's only 9 days from today.
•Teams can officially begin talking to free agents from other teams on Saturday, March 9th---of course this has already begun unofficially, with the highlight being last week at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis.
•The finalized $123 million cap (up $1.9 million this week from the original $121.1 million projection) is courtesy of this:
Sources: Salary cap up to $123M | courtesy of ESPN's Chris Mortensen & The Associated Press | Updated: February 28, 2013, 8:06 PM ET
•5 teams are over the salary cap at this time: New Orleans, Washington, Carolina, St. Louis, & Oakland.
•12 teams are not on pace to meet the cap spending limit so far.
•$109,470,000 is the number which equals 89% of the cap spending limit (cash spending) on average for this year’s cap.
•This doesn’t count against these teams yet, but is just for reference purposes to understand where teams are in terms of their spending SO FAR with respect to this new rule which is in effect starting this year—teams will NOT be penalized this year if they don’t spend any more money towards the cap.
•It counts towards a 4 year cycle, or “bucket”, which begins in 2013 season and ends in the 2016 season.
•The penalty for not spending the required minimum amount of cash money towards the cap will not be meted out until after the 2016 season cap spending figures have been calculated.
•If the total cap spending of teams in cash money between 2013 & 2016 does not turn out to be 89% of the salary cap for those four years, then that team will be penalized monetarily on early 2017—no draft picks or any other kind of penalty affecting personnel or salary cap space will be meted out.
•Any team(s) which will NOT have spent 89% of its cap will be required to pay the remainder back to the players who played for the respective team(s).
•The remainder will be divided up by the amount of players who played for the team(s) in question, and then that cash remainder will be distributed evenly amongst them.