Roster and Salary Cap Countdown to Week 1

With training camps now essentially over and the last preseason games coming up this weekend, each NFL teams will now begin turning their undivided attention towards finalizing their roster ahead of the first week of the season.

Like all teams, the Ravens will have to decide how to whittle down their roster by next Tuesday, August 27th at 4:00 PM.  They will also need to be under the Salary Cap by the following Wednesday night, September 4th at midnight.

This is where the Ravens are going to have some work to do.

First, the important upcoming dates:

CUTDOWN TO 53 – Presently teams can have up to 90 players on their active rosters.  As of next Tuesday at 4:00 PM, all teams will have to get that number down to 53.  They will accomplish that by moving players to Injured Reserve (IR), Reserve PUP and releasing players.

ESTABLISHING PRACTICE SQUADS – At Noon on the following day – Wednesday, August 28^th – the waiver period for players released in the final cutdown expires. At 1:00 p.m. that day, teams may begin signing players to their practice squads. Teams’ practice squads may consist of 16 players. The minimum salary for most practice squad players in 2024 is $12,500 per week (or $225,000 if on the PS for the entire season), however teams are allowed to sign up to six (6) players to the Practice Squad with no limit on their service time.  Those players make from $16,800 to $21,300 per week (or $302,400 up to $383,400 if on the PS for the entire season).  For practice squad eligibility rules, click here.

Now, comes the hard part…

CAP COMPLIANCE, END OF RULE OF 51 – At 12:00 a.m. on the Thursday, September 5th this year, the Rule of 51 expires and teams must have all players – 53-man roster, IR, PUP, PS – fit under the Cap.  So, from that point forward, the team would have to count the 53 players on the active roster + anyone that starts the season on IR/PUP + 16 PS players under the Cap. This means that a minimum of 69 players will count against the Cap as of the beginning of the season.

Presently, the Ravens already have a player on IR (Malik Hamm) and a player who is going to start the season on PUP (Keaton Mitchell).  It also seems likely that CB Arthur Maulet will be placed on IR next week.  There will likely be another player or two who will end up on IR.  So, with that the Ravens will initially have at least 72 players to be fit under their Salary Cap.

The Ravens presently have $5,083,715 in Salary Cap space. That is not going to be enough for their future expenses and it can be expected that the Ravens will be restructuring a contract or two over the next week.

FUTURE EXPENSES: The Ravens are going to need Cap space for the following future expenses:

• First, there will be the two (2) players added to the Cap to go from 51 (Rule of 51) to 53. That will be a minimum of $1.59M.
• Then, there’s the 16-member Practice Squad, which will take up another $4-4.4M.
• Teams will also need to set aside money for weekly Practice Squad elevations ($1.2M).
• Finally, teams like to carry at least $5-6M in Cap space into the season for injury replacements.

Needless to say, the present $5,083,715 will not cover all of those expenses.  As such, as has been mentioned here (and Twitter/X), the team is going to need to restructure a deal or two to get there.  Luckily for the Ravens, they have not restructured any of their bigger deals, so options do exist.  The below chart breaks down these future expenses and includes examples of the restructures that are possible:

Note: The above restructure amounts are straight salary to bonus (“simple”) restructures and do not include added void years.  In some of the above cases, the potential Cap space created would be more if void years were added.

As the chart indicates, the Ravens have a lot of work to do to basically just break even for the season.  And, if they want to be active at the trade deadline, they will also need to create even more Cap space (either now or later as the November 5th trade deadline approaches).  A restructure or two will do the trick, it’s just a matter of which player (or players) the team determines is best to create Cap space now, while also being mindful of the future impact of any restructure(s).