salary cap hell!

The Super Bowl team with arguably the best QB in football, who has already been paid, has $100m more in cap space than us going into 2024 before any restructures. We need to create $100m worth of dead money through restructures just to match their spending capacity, which puts us back in the cycle for 2025. Mahomes is not tremendously underpaid either, his AAV for the rest of his contract (including 2023) is $45m/yr. It's not going to take a big change in their strategy if they need to get him above Burrow next year (>$55m/yr).

Loomis said in an interview that we would do some belt tightening this year, it will be interesting to see if he follows through with it.

To add on to this...

Per OTC, extending Mahomes to make him the highest paid QB in the league could potentially free up $34.6m in 2024. A simple restructure for Juwaan Taylor frees up $12.5m. So that would put the Chiefs with an estimated $71.1m in free cap space for 2024... coming directly off a Super Bowl appearance AND making Mahomes the highest paid QB in the league.

Let's look at the top two teams in the NFC...

The 49ers are $3.7m over the cap. Restructuring their top five cap hits frees up $61.4m, leaving them with $57.7m in cap space.

The Lions have $47.6m in cap space. Extending Goff frees $20m. Restructuring their next four frees another $21m in cap space. That puts the Lions at $88.6m in cap space, and they can free more if they want to, they can have over $100m in cap space if they want, although I don't think they will.

Meanwhile the Saints after SonofNOLA's linked cap maneuvers will have approximately $9.2m in cap space.

The Saints haven't won their division or been to the playoffs in three consecutive seasons. In that same stretch, the 49ers have been to three straight NFC Championship games and the Chiefs have been to six straight AFC Championship games.