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The NFLPA produced its own estimate of what the salary cap will end up being in 2015, and their number of $143 million is significantly higher than the estimate given by the NFL Management Council in December, which was anywhere between $138.6 million to $141.8 million.
From the guys over at OverTheCap,
The NFLPA has said for a few weeks now that they will give their own estimates for the salary cap limits so that players and agents do not need to rely on NFL estimates and today they gave it -- $143 million, a rise of $10 million from last season. If they are correct in their assessment this will mark the second year in a row in which the cap rose by $10 million after three years of a flat salary cap.
The NFLPA does not want teams operating in free agency on a lower-than-reality budget.
"Last year, bizarrely, we had a few owners come out and I guess before this meeting and talk about a flat salary cap that ultimately jumped," NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith said Friday. It jumped by $10 million, which is, obviously, an additional $320 million in cap room that teams weren't planning on having to spend on free agents, spread across the league.
"After that, we became convinced that it was important for us to give projections, because we didn't want, in many cases, general managers relying on information that was not supported by the evidence or our agents relying on information that just didn't make sense. Our goal is to constantly arm our contract advisors and everybody involved in the system with the best information to negotiate deals for our players. We felt that if they have what we believe are closer to accurate projections, that's good for everybody."
This $143 million figure is exactly what our own cap expert Davis Hsu has been using in his models, so A) kudos to him for that foresight, and B) his models don't get altered by this news.
As of right now, the Seahawks have $25.4 million in cap space but with Russell Wilson and Seattle's other free agents about to come down the pike, that number isn't really realistic from a spending spree point of view.