Over the course of the offseason there’s been no shortage of debate regarding whether the Seattle Seahawks opted to head down the correct path at the quarterback position, trading Geno Smith to the Las Vegas Raiders and signing free agent Sam Darnold. Whether one prefers Sam Darnold for $105M or Geno Smith for $106M over the next three seasons, the bigger issue at play is not who will be under center for Seattle in 2025, but how the rapidly rising salary cap has thrown a wrench in salary equity across the league.
After years of teams continually operating right up against the salary cap due to the knock on effects of the pandemic-driven revenue shortfall from the 2020 season, teams across the league are flush with cap space. According to the NFLPA public salary cap report, nearly two thirds of NFL teams have more than $20M in cap space available for the 2025 season, with 11 teams sitting on more than $30M of available cap space.
And, that cap space didn’t get created by teams going cheap in free agency, as the average of the top free 75 agent contracts was up more than 21% over the average of the top 75 free agent contracts signed in 2024.
A recap of the top 75 free agents this year compared to last year’s free agent class. A lot of people thought this free agent class was much poorer compared to last year’s, but teams still spent more money this year both in APY and as a % of cap at signing pic.twitter.com/VYgjiBviWG
— Daniel Salib (@salibdaniel1) March 26, 2025
Salary growth should come as no surprise, as the 2025 cap of $279.2M is 9.32% higher than the 2024 cap of $255.4M. However, the jump in top end salaries isn’t simply because the cap increased, it’s because the cap increased at a higher percentage than minimum salaries.
NFL minimum salaries are determined by how many credited seasons a player has earned during their career, and the 2020 CBA gives players in each category a $45,000 raise in each new league year. That amount, $45,000, is certainly not a small amount, but as a percentage is comes in far lower than the 9.32% that the cap overall increased.
At the low end, a rookie with no NFL experience has a minimum salary of $840,000, a 5.67% increase over the $795,000 minimum from 2024. On the other end of the spectrum, a veteran with seven or more years of experience saw their minimum salary increase from $1,210,000 to $1,255,000, or 3.58%. It doesn’t take rocket surgeon to figure out that 5.67% and 3.58% are both less than 9.32%, and that’s where the rookie wage scale is driving up top end salaries.
Specifically, as noted here on Field Gulls earlier in the offseason, the overwhelming majority of the roster for any given team is made up of players on rookie contracts, or at least subject to the constraints of the rookie wage scale. This is because until a player has four accrued seasons and qualifies for free agency, their earnings are effectively capped by the rookie wage scale and the CBA.
In turn, the cap space that is available to teams therefore gets funneled to the players on second and third contracts who are no longer subject to the rookie wage scale. The specifics will vary by team and by roster construction and management style, but each franchise will have somewhere around a dozen players that fall into the group that are not restricted by the rookie wage scale. Of these dozen players, the majority will not hit free agency in any given offseason, meaning there will only be a handful of roster spots on which most of the salary cap increase will be spent.
The result is that instead of a $23.8M increase in the salary cap resulting in nine or ten percent raises across the board, lower paid players see their salaries increase by the three to five percent dictated by the CBA and a handful of players per team share the rest of the shared revenue loot.
The change in any one offseason is not enough to be alarming, but over the course of several year, the differences between the haves and the have nots within the ranks of the players become more stark.
Ten years ago this month, Super Bowl winning quarterback Russell Wilson signed a four-year, $87.6M contract that made him the second highest paid player in the NFL, and days later future Hall of Famer Bobby Wagner signed a four-year, $43M contract extension. With the 2025 season just around the corner, there are now nine offensive linemen on contracts that average more than the $21.9M the Seahawks paid Wilson on his second contract, with dozens of non-quarterbacks earning more than that amount. Half the positions in the league now get paid more than that amount on the franchise tag, with only defensive backs, tight ends, running backs, kickers and punters with a franchise tag amount in 2025 that is less than $21.9M.
Meanwhile, the rank and file that make up the majority of the NFLPA membership continue to have limited post-playing days benefits, such as health insurance, assuming their career is long enough to even qualify. And, with each passing season the divide becomes larger and larger. By the time the current CBA is set to expire after the 2030 season, ten year veterans on minimum salary deals are set be earning $1.48M, while competent interior offensive line play could be costing teams $25M-$30M per year.
In short, while the establishment of the rookie wage scale was certainly called for given the landscape of rookie contracts in the years leading up to the 2011 lockout, the scale has driven things too far out of balance, and the restrictions of the CBA have created a salary cap problem the NFL and NFLPA should address earlier rather than later.