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I don't know. Seems low - at least lower than I thought. No wonder we aren't after anyone else. We still have the draft to worry about. I din't know you could sign a full draft of players with only 3.5M in cap space, but there's teams with less than we have....
Team-by-team cap room, as of March 30 | ProFootballTalk
Wow that actually sounds scary. Can anyone say I see some trade-downs on draft day ? Course I don't know much about cap rules compared to some of you guys, so if someone can explain how signing , say , 6 draft picks will actually work I'm all ears ..... unless of course several guys are gonna be released soon.
Something aint right with those numbers, not saying they are wrong, i just think they dont mean what most people think they mean.
For instance...its says its from 51 players under contract, Matt Forte isnt under contract yet, and if he signs the FTag contract, thats over 7M right there...putting us WAY over that "cap room" number of 3.5M
The information in that article is based on something called the "top 51 rule", now I'll plead guilty about not knowing much about these things, but reading through the comments section I found this:
"adamjt13 says: Mar 30, 2012 10:25 PM
Max,
Teams won’t need nearly that much cap room to sign all of their draft picks, because of the Top 51 Rule. When a draftee signs and his cap number is among the team’s 51 highest, he knocks another out of the Top 51, and that player’s base salary no longer counts against the cap. If the draftee’s cap number is not among the team’s 51 highest cap numbers, HIS base salary does not count against the cap. That means that, for each draft pick a team uses, the cap room that it will need to sign all of its rookies will be AT LEAST $390,000 less than its rookie pool. For example, if a team uses eight draft picks and has a rookie pool of $7 million, that team will need no more than $3.88 million in cap room to sign all of its rookies ($7 million minus $390,000 per draft pick used). For some teams, the players knocked out of the Top 51 will have had base salaries of $465,000, so they’d need even less cap room to sign their rookies."
unfortunately, I don't have the time to chase down Info on the Top 51 rule....(real life), but someone here probably already knows and can enlighten us.
So as near as I can figure, because of the way the Cap Space info was arrived at, the remaining cap space is at least likely to cover the draft. Also, it is safe to presume that there will be players who don't make the team, further reducing the total player salary. The Bears didn't change any of their numbers guys, I'm confident that they are aware of the costs relative to the cap space issues and have planned for it.
Heck, the Bengals have 30 million + in cap space left. 3.5 million means the team is spending money. I know this isn't baseball but we're talking about the Bengals here.