The Indianapolis Colts are currently set to enter the 2025 NFL offseason with $28.39 million in available cap space, according to Over the Cap. However, there are a number of ways they can increase that amount, but how do the Colts go about doing that?
One primary avenue is through a contract restructure, which is ideally done when a player has multiple years left on their current deal–although there are workarounds to that via void years being added to the contracts, but we’ll dive into that at a different time since none of the examples below utilize that method.
Now, there are certainly nuances to this maneuver, but in short, a restructure is kicking the salary cap can down the road by moving a portion of the current year’s cap charges to future years. The benefit is that the player’s salary cap hit in the current year will decrease, but the downside is that his cap hit in future seasons will have increased.
An example of this would be if a player has an $8 million base salary with three years left on his contract. The team could take $6 million of that base salary–which all counts towards the current year’s salary cap–and convert that to a signing bonus, which has the flexibility to be pro-rated over the life of the deal. So from there, $2 million will stay in the current year, $2 million will go into Year 2 of the contract, and $2 million go into Year 3.
The end result is that this would then lower the current year’s cap hit from $8 million to $4 million, with $4 million going to the two future years.
Compared to the rest of the NFL, the Colts’ $28-million plus in current available cap space ranks 18th. That figure also doesn’t account for the rollover amount of unused cap space from the 2024 season.
With GM Chris Ballard saying that he needs to add more competition throughout the roster, do we see the Colts take a different approach in free agency this offseason?
To help us get an idea of who some contract restructure candidates are and the amount of cap space that could be created for the Colts this offseason, Pro Football Network has done the leg work and calculated the potential savings available for Indianapolis.