Eagles

An Early Look at the Eagles’ 2019 Salary Cap Situation

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jan 15th, 2019 · 11:10 AM EST

---

Never too early to take a look ahead.

Howie Roseman will speak later today, but as of 48 hours since the team’s divisional round playoff-exit, he needs to clear more than ten million dollars in salary to become cap compliant. We’ll have to see where the NFL cap total comes in, but right now it’s expected to be around $10 million higher than the 2018 number.

Here’s the current team projection, according to Spotrac:

• max cap: $195,157,735
• active contracts: $206,843,884
• dead cap: $2,286,667
• total cap: $209,130,551
• estimate space: $-13,972,816

They did a lot of shuffling and maneuvering to get to this point, a number of restructuring deals to help move money around. Here’s what the top end of the Eagles’ chart looks like, the top 10 players. You can click on the image to enlarge it in your current window:

Couple of things here:

Obviously the Nick Foles contract is a unique situation. I’m sure he’ll be on a different team next season because you just can’t pay both him and Carson Wentz without making major sacrifices somewhere else.

Here’s a primer via Andrew Brandt:

Nick Foles contract details:
-Eagles must decide by 30 days before League Year (approx Feb 12) whether to exercise option for $20M salary;
-If Eagles exercise, Foles has 5 days to pay $2M to void, become FA;
-If not voided, $20M becomes fully guaranteed 5th day of League Year.

— Andrew Brandt (@AndrewBrandt) January 14, 2019

The Birds can free up $18 million by moving on from Nick.

The other thing that jumps out to me on that list is Jason Peters’ $10,000,000 cap hit. I think you have to release him and eat the $2.6m in dead cap, which is manageable. Can you trust him to stay on the field? He turns 37 next week. If you’re lucky, he retires instead.

Rodney McLeod is coming off an injury and carries a pretty hefty dead cap number, while Tim Jernigan’s contract renegotiation turned this coming season into a team option year. The other six guys are veteran starters and key pieces of the squad.

As far as re-signing other guys, Brandon Graham is the biggest name out there. BG had the fourth-highest cap hit on the team this season, coming in at $8,000,000. He intimated Monday that he’d be willing to take a home-town discount if the numbers weren’t too far off.

Michael Bennett is also a free agent, or technically a guy with a contract that can be voided without incurring dead money. He’s a guy who hit the cap at $5.6 million in 2018. Mike Wallace is an unrestricted free agent, so his $4 million comes off the books, same with Golden Tate, who hit at $3.75 million. You’re also saving $6.6 million on Haloti Ngata, Jordan Hicks, and Darren Sproles, all of whom are unrestricted free agents.

Here are the other free agents:

• Chance Warmack
• Chris Maragos
• Corey Graham
• Ronald Darby
• Paul Worrilow
• Richard Rodgers
• LaRoy Reynolds
• Jordan Matthews
• Jay Ajayi
• D.J. Alexander
• Nate Sudfeld (RFA)
• Rick Lovato (RFA)
• Jake Elliott

Safe to assume those special teamers will probably be back at very reasonable prices (Alexander, Lovato, Elliott, and maybe Reynolds). Sudfeld will probably get a second-round qualifying tender. Ajayi and Darby, unfortunately, were both in the final year of their rookie deals when they got hurt. Really crappy situations for those two guys, who were about to make some real NFL money.

A few more cap notes on various guys:

Carson Wentz

Carson will hit the cap at $8.4 million in the final year of his rookie deal. Obviously he needs to be signed to a long-term extension sooner rather than later, and with franchise quarterbacks now exactly growing on trees, he will command upwards of $20 million a year. Aaron Rodgers and others are in the $30 million range now.

Chris Long

They redid his contract at the end of last season, giving him more money upfront. Moving on from him in 2019 leaves you with a miniscule $300,000 dead cap number, though he’s also a candidate to simply retire.

Tim Jernigan

His cap hit jumps from $5 million to $13 million. Dead cap is $11 million. I mentioned the team option earlier, so they need to decide what they want to do with him.

Mychal Kendricks

$1.6 million of the Eagles’ already existing dead cap is a result of releasing Kendricks following his arrest on insider trading charges.

That’s it for now. We’ll see what Howie says this afternoon.