Taking a look at where the Detroit Lions salary cap stands ahead of the 2024 free agency period.
The NFL salary cap is a complicated system that is constantly changing, often misunderstood, but equally fascinating. The fluidity of the system makes it difficult to accurately predict where teams are with their finances, but that doesn’t stop people from wanting to know where things stand.
On Wednesday, March 13 at 4 p.m. ET, the 2024 league new year begins and at that time, every team in the NFL must be cap compliant. The Detroit Lions are in a very comfortable spot and have spent the majority of the past few weeks re-signing keep contributors . The Lions still have several players to make decisions on , but they’ve already agreed to re-sign one of their top pending free agent Graham Glasgow , and should still have enough capital available to add more talent in free agency.
Let’s take a look at where Detroit stands with its current salary cap to better understand roughly how much money they may spend in free agency.
The NFL set the league salary cap at $255.4 million for the upcoming season, a massive increase from previous seasons. But the Lions also ended 2023 with a surplus of money on their salary cap, which will allow them to “rollover” even more money onto this year’s salary cap. These details haven’t been officially released by the league, but based on guesses from salary cap websites like OverTheCap.com and Spotrac.com the number figures to be close to $3.5 million. There are also “adjustments” to teams’ salary caps—adjustments to player contracts based on bonuses earned or not earned in the previous season—and the Lions are projected to break close to even in this area.
That means, $255.4M + $3.5M + even = Lions maximum salary cap approximately $258.9M for the 2024 season.
In the offseason, teams are allowed to expand their rosters to 90 players but only the top 51 contracts count against the salary cap. At this time, the Lions have 60 players under contract, with 59 of those contracts reported—we do not have cap hit numbers on the Glasgow contract yet—and they total around $192M.
Additionally, the Lions have around $23M in dead cap hits, after releasing players like Tracy Walker ($7.3M), Marvin Jones ($800K), and a collection of voided contracts previously used to reduce cap hits in previous seasons. Therefore, adding the current salaries ($192M) and dead cap hits ($23M) and you get $215M currently being used.
$258.9M – $215M = $43.9 M in available cap space entering free agency
While this number is what’s currently available, the Lions will set aside certain pockets of money for several upcoming costs.
Based on this regime’s previous contract designs, Glasgow’s contract is expected to have a low cap hit this season, likely somewhere between $3 and $4M. Additionally, the Lions draft class is projected to cost $8.6M, but because of the top-51 rule, only about $6M will impact the salary cap. The Lions’ practice squad will cost between $3 and $4M during the regular season, and the Lions typically leave around $8 to $10M for in-season moves and injured reserve.
That means the future operating costs of the franchise will account for roughly half of what they have available, leaving around $20-24M to spend in free agency.
While that number may seem lower than the number that is currently being reported, it’s important to keep two things in mind: 1) every team is approaching free agency this way; 2) most free agency contracts are backloaded (like with Glasgow) and therefore have a lower initial cap hit.
With 30 spots still open and a healthy pool of money to lean on, the Lions have a lot of flexibility in this free agency period.