CINCINNATI -- The Cincinnati Bengals have more than $162 million to spend on all player contracts this season, according to salary-cap numbers released Monday by the NFL Players Association.
The numbers were released two days before the new league year begins. Financially speaking, the 2016 season starts at 4 p.m. ET Wednesday. By that time, each of the 32 teams must be under the salary-cap limit.
The Bengals are currently under it and won't have to make any drastic cuts before Wednesday.
Cincinnati's $162,677,552 total adjusted salary cap includes a rollover of $7,587,902 from the 2015 season. Because of that rollover and other minor adjustments, Cincinnati's total player spending will exceed the $155 million teams are permitted to dole out this year.
As is common practice for the Bengals, the $7.59 million rollover will go toward signing longer-term extensions later this summer to players whose contracts expire after this coming season. So Tyler Eifert, Giovani Bernard, Dre Kirkpatrick and Kevin Zeitler are all candidates to receive new contracts that will use part of the rollover to account for paying the first year of possible new deals. It seems likely that Eifert will receive most, if not all of that cash.
With the Bengals still needing to re-sign a number of their current 13 unrestricted free agents, they might be tempted to dip into the rollover this week. They won't do it. The team remains married to the idea of only using the rollover money to pay summertime extensions.
According to figures from ESPN's Roster Management system, the Bengals have $123,976,473 of the 2016 cap devoted to current contracts. That would leave -- including the rollover -- more than $38.7 million for them to spend this year, based on ESPN and NFLPA numbers.
If you take out the rollover, however, the Bengals formally have $31.1 million to use for new contracts. That money would go to pending free agents, soon-to-be drafted players/college free-agent signees, this year's practice squad and other injury and dead-money protections. Because of all the money the Bengals anticipate spending on draft picks, injury protections and the like, the team formally puts its available cap space for this week's free agency purposes at about $15 million.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the Bengals plan to pay multiple free agents this week with that being the amount they anticipate spending.