NFL officially sets salary cap at $177.2 million

With one week to go before the “legal tampering” period of free agency begins, teams now know exactly how much they’ll be able to spent.

The National Football League has announced that the salary cap for the 2018 season will be $177.2 million dollars per team. That’s a $10.2 million increase over last year’s figure, and marks the fifth consecutive season that the cap has gone up by at least $10 million.

According to the folks from Over the Cap, that means that the Minnesota Vikings have exactly $47,634,443 to spend in free agency. Of course, this doesn’t take into account several things that could happen between now and the start of the free agency, such as the Vikings settling their grievance with defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd and/or releasing or restructuring the deal of running back Latavius Murray. There are other things they could probably do to free up more space as well, but those appear to be the two primary ways of increasing the available cap room for Rob Brzezinski and company.

A great deal of the salary cap space that the Vikings have will, of course, be taken up by whoever they wind up signing at quarterback. We all know that we’ve had enough discussion of that situation over the past few weeks, and we’ll have an answer. . .hopefully. . .in the next week or so.

Remember, the “legal tampering” period of free agency starts on Monday, 12 March, but teams can’t officially sign anyone until two days after that on Wednesday, 14 March at 3:00 PM Central time. I’m sure that if we don’t have a quarterback resolution by 3:05 PM there are going to be plenty of angry Vikings fans out there, but I wouldn’t expect it to happen quite that fast.