As of now, we do not yet know who the Jacksonville Jaguars’ general manager is going to be. Interview requests have just recently been submitted by the Jaguars.
However, if the team’s future general manager wants to go full throttle in his first season and bring in a number of additions to help Liam Coen in Year 1, the Jaguars have the ability to create an additional $43.76 million in cap space, according to Over the Cap.
The primary way that the Jaguars could accomplish this is through simple contract restructures–or kicking the salary cap can down the road.
As always, there is a lot of nuance that comes with these salary cap moves, but in short, a restructure is taking some of the current year’s salary cap charges and pushing them to future seasons.
One example of this would be if a player has an $8 million base salary with three years left on his contract. The team could take $6 million of that base salary–which all counts towards the current year’s salary cap–and convert that to a signing bonus, which has the flexibility to be pro-rated over the life of the deal.
So from there, $2 million will stay in the current year, $2 million will go into Year 2 of the contract, and $2 million go into Year 3.
The end result in this scenario is that this would then lower the current year’s cap hit from $8 million to $4 million, with $4 million going to the two future years.
The obvious benefit is that in the moment, more cap space is created. But those cap charges don’t just disappear either. So the downside is that the player’s cap hit in future years will now increase.
The ideal candidate for a contract restructure is with a player who has more than one year left on their deal and someone who comes with a sizeable cap hit. Walker Little, Davon Hamilton, Foyesade Oluokun, and others, are a few candidates on the Jaguars.
While that $44 million figure from Over the Cap is if the Jaguars push things to the limit this offseason, this isn’t an all or nothing proposition either.
I certainly wouldn’t expect Jacksonville’s general manager to squeeze every bit of cap savings out of all the eligible contracts, but oftentimes there is some maneuvering that is done by GMs to gain more offseason flexibility.
For the Jaguars who are coming off a four-win season and I’m sure will want to put as many pieces as possible around Coen, some positions of need this offseason include cornerback, safety, defensive tackle, offensive line, and tight end.
As of now, the Jaguars have $32.27 million in available cap space, which ranks as the 17th-most. This figure does not yet include their rollover amount of unused cap space from 2024, which was estimated to be among the higher totals in the NFL.
In addition to restructures helping to create more cap space, an extension can work in a similar fashion and one extension candidate for the Jaguars is Travon Walker.
Veteran cuts are another avenue towards cap savings, and ESPN recently predicted that two prominent Jaguars players are potential cut candidates this offseason.
