Upshaw: Salary cap to be set at about $80.5M

By Don Banks, SI.com

INDIANAPOLIS -- There's good news on the way this week for the half-dozen or so NFL teams that are currently struggling to fight their way under the projected 2004 salary cap: Come Friday, there's going to be a little more cap room than first expected.

NFL Players Association executive director Eugene Upshaw said Wednesday that the league will announce this week that the 2004 salary cap has been set at around $80.5 million per team, almost $2 million more than the $78.7 million preliminary figure that teams had been using as they prepared for the NFL's new business year, which coincides with the opening of free agency on March 3.

Last year's cap wound up being set at just more than $75 million before free agency opened, so this year's $80.5 million cap represents a sizable increase of about 6.6 percent.

Upshaw, in Indianapolis to attend the NFL Scouting Combine, which cranks to life in earnest Thursday, did not provide details of the factors behind the additional cap increase. But he voiced optimism that the extra cap room would greatly aid those teams that have cap overages, and keep some clubs from having to make as many painful salary cap cuts.

"The extra money is really going to help those teams that are tight up against it and have those tough decisions to make,'' Upshaw said. "It's gives everybody a little more to work with.''

When the projected cap was $78.7 million, the six teams that were considered over the cap, at least based on payroll figures in recent days, were Tennessee (by $17 million-plus), Miami ($10 million-plus), Denver ($5 million-plus), Pittsburgh ($4 million-plus), New England ($4 million-plus) and Tampa Bay (almost $3 million). That's the lowest figure in recent years of teams that had significant cap work to do just two weeks shy of the start of free agency. There were about twice as many teams over the cap at the same point in the offseason last year.

At least four other teams that were under the $78.7 million projected cap, but just barely in some cases, will be helped by the extra cap dollars: Green Bay (about $1 million of room), the Jets ($1.2 million), Oakland (about $500,000) and San Francisco (about $200,000).

Teams must be at or under the salary cap by the close of business on March 2, and have less than a week (Feb. 24) to designate any of their potential free agents as franchise players or transition players.

The first $80-million cap in NFL history will mean that fewer teams will have to do wide-scale contract restructuring in order to fit under the cap. Fewer cap cuts and contract restructurings also should decrease the amount of "dead money'' that teams are forced to carry on their caps this season -- those cap dollars that are tied up by players no longer on the roster.