Colts Salary Cap Update & How it Compares Around the League

The Colts have signed most of their draft picks and with the free agency spending spree over, we can get a very good picture of how much cap space the Colts have and how it compares around the league.

The Colts currently have around:

• $183M in top 51 liabilities (their top 51 largest contracts)
• $24M in dead cap space, with 75% of that coming from Matt Ryan
• The NFL salary cap is set at 224.8M and the Colts have an additional 7.3M in rollovers and adjustments
• That means that their current salary cap space figure is around 24-25M.

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Big 2024 Free Agents

The 2024 offseason may not seem like a big priority at the moment, but the Colts have three big names hitting free agency and two of the three could see big extensions so having cap space to rollover is important. The following players are considered to be key free agents, with the major ones in bold:

Grover Stewart

Michael Pittman Jr

Jonathan Taylor

Kenny Moore

Taven Bryan

Gardner Minshew

Rigoberto Sanchez

Julian Blackmon

If Stewart could earn a contract worth 15M per year, Pittman earn one worth 17M a year and Taylor earning one at 10M a year, that’s an additional 26.6M in money that needs to go to those guys (their current cap hits add up to around 15.4M). I can tell you from now that the Colts won’t be spending too much money on outside free agents next spring.

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Salary Cap Positional Breakdown

*All amounts in 2023 cap dollars and from Spotrac

Quarterbacks

Colts Spending: 4.47M

Percentage of Cap: 1.93%

League Average: 17.4M

League Rank: 29th

Colts will be super low in this category because they spent a small amount on Minshew for a year and Richardson is on a rookie contract. The Colts being so low in this area can be a huge advantage in the next 3 years.

Running Backs

Colts Spending: 9.73M

Percentage of Cap: 4.19%

League Average: 12.3M

League Rank: 13th

The Colts are still low in this area because of Jonathan Taylor’s contract being a rookie one.

Wide Receivers

Colts Spending: 18.06M

Percentage of Cap: 7.78%

League Average: 29M

League Rank: 28th

The Colts are still low in this category because of Pittman, Downs and Pierce’s contracts all being rookie ones.

Tight Ends

Colts Spending: 11.14M

Percentage of Cap: 4.80%

League Average: 11.7M

League Rank: 18th

Mo Alie Cox is the player propping up this market to around the league average. His play needs to improve for him to make his contract be worth it for the Colts.

Offensive Line

Colts Spending: 54.16M

Percentage of Cap: 23.33%

League Average: 44.2M

League Rank: 6th

The Colts have spent a lot of money on the offensive line and they’ll need a big bounce back after a terrible performance in 2022. The unit is paid as one of the best so they will need to play as one of the best for the Colts to receive a good return on an investment, because so far they are getting low returns.

Defensive Line

Colts Spending: 48.93M

Percentage of Cap: 21.08%

League Average: 37.9M

League Rank: 9th

This unit is amongst the 10 highest in the NFL, but unlike the offensive line, this group actually performs and gets great play from their top guys.

Linebackers

Colts Spending: 30.77M

Percentage of Cap: 13.25%

League Average: 25.7

League Rank: 12th

The Colts have thrown around some money on linebackers, mostly with Darius Leonard but also with Zaire Franklin who is looking like tremendous value on a 3.3M a year contract.

Secondary

Colts Spending: 26.31M

Percentage of Cap: 11.34%

League Average: 37.8M

League Rank: 28th

The secondary is filled with a bunch of young players on rookie deals so the overall cap hit will be very low.

Special Teams

Colts Spending: 7.93M

Percentage of Cap: 3.42%

League Average: 6.5M

League Rank: 10th

The Colts spent big money on Gay which is why the group is amongst the highest in the league.