On March 12 of every calendar year in the NFL, teams go out and pursue players that, effective the end of the previous season, now are no longer under contract with the team they last played for. Some teams, like the Oakland Raiders in this year’s case, have a ton of salary cap space whereas a number of teams have little to no cap room due to myriad reasons. Some of which include a team cutting a player with guaranteed money left on his contract; the term “dead money” has become prevalent in analyzing money paid out to released players. The dead money (applied to the salary cap along with a team’s roster) can be counted towards the cap either all of season #1 after the player gets cut or it can be divided between season #1 and season #2 after the release of a player with guaranteed money left on his contract. Having dead money against the cap; for example, the Raiders in 2013 had their hands tied due to taking on all of the dead money in 2013 whereas in 2014 they had between $60M and $70M in cap room, enabling them to sign nine free agents as of 10:05 PM PDT on March 24, 2014. Last year they couldn’t do that due to the enormous amount of dead money against the salary cap. Some of the other teams also had a lot of cap room while the rest of them had their hands tied.
In conclusion, I hope you’ll get a better understanding of how the salary cap is determined per team as well as how free agency works in the NFL. I can’t wait for Kickoff ’14 in September.