Last month, the National Football League announced that each of its teams would have a $208.2 million salary cap for the coming season. This represents a sizable increase from the 2021 season, for which the cap had been affected by the pandemic. A few weeks later, The Sporting News analyzed the league’s payrolls for the coming season to get a sense of which teams had less and more financial wiggle room.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were in the bottom half of that list, with just under $7 million in cap space available to them. For a team with big ambitions, that could make things tricky. All of that makes The Athletic’s report that the Buccaneers and Tom Brady have come to an agreement on a restructured contract for Brady a big deal in both the literal and figurative senses of the phrase.
Writing at The Athletic, Greg Auman pointed out that this “gives the Bucs a much-needed wiggle room of $9 million in salary cap space.” Auman pointed to Rob Gronkowski and Ndamukong Suh as players who could benefit from this.
While Brady’s contact is up after the coming season, the restructured deal will still find him contributing to the team’s salary cap. Auman notes that Brady retiring after the 2022 season would give the Buccaneers the ability to move $22 million to the 2024 salary cap. Should Brady move elsewhere in the NFL for 2023, Auman writes, that would involve “$33 million in dead money against the 2023 cap.”
Could Tom Brady’s next offseason be as impactful as this one? It sure seems like it.
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