How much cap space do the Jets have left?

Let's attempt to bring the Jets' cap position up to date as much as we can at this time.

Official cap update

The NFLPA has released their first set of official numbers. However, these won't take into account most of the deals announced so far. According to these numbers Jets have 63 players under contract and $46.4 million of cap space.

Obviously the Jets have more players than that under contract so this doesn't take a lot of recent deals into account.

It's impossible to determine which deals are and aren't included, but a good starting point is that, according to their official website, the Jets have 64 players under contract.

The total of 64, however, doesn't include Arthur Maulet and James Burgess who have recently been re-signed, or any of the eight new signings (Marqui Christian, Pierre Desir, Josh Andrews, George Fant, Greg Van Roten, Connor McGovern, Breshad Perriman, Patrick Onwuasor). So really it's 74 under contract right now...or, in fact, 75 because even though Trumaine Johnson has been released he'll remain under contract until June since he's been denoted as a June cut.

Within that 64, there are five players who the Jets have re-signed since free agency opened (Neville Hewitt, Bennett Jackson, Jordan Jenkins, Alex Lewis and Brian Poole). So you can bet that the other 59 are included in the NFLPA total of 63. The other four could be any of the players signed since free agency began and may or may not include Johnson.

UPDATE: Since posting we've found two other omissions from the Jets' official roster; Charles Tapper - who was on the non-injury list last year but remained under contract - and Daniel Brown, another recent re-signing. So the Jets have 77 under contract including Trumaine Johnson and 14 of these are not account for by the NFLPA. This will not affect the calculations below.

Updating the figures for the new deals

OverTheCap.com has the Jets' current cap space figure at $36.5 million. From the new deals, that only takes into account Fant, Lewis and Poole's numbers. It does not include Maulet, Burgess, the other seven new guys and it also doesn't include Jenkins, Jackson and Hewitt's new deals yet.

The difference of $10 million between OTC's figures and the officially updated NFLPA numbers which only take into account officially completed paperwork suggests there are differences between the players taken into account in the two sets of figures.

Can we estimate the year one cap hits for all those deals not taken into account by OTC? Let's give it a shot.

Maulet - $1 million
Burgess - $1 million
Christian - $2 million (reported one-year, $2m deal)
Desir -$4 million (reported one-year, up to $5.5m deal)
Andrews - $1 million
Van Roten - $4 million
McGovern - $6 million (reported three-year, $27m deal)
Onwuasor - $3 million
Perriman - $6 million (reported one-year deal with $6m base and $2m incentives)

Where no contract specifics have been reported, the above number is a guess. We assume Maulet, Burgess and Andrews would have been at or near the minimum. Van Roten is valued at just over $4 million by OTC, while Onwuasor was valued at $5 million by Spotrac but only $1 million by OTC so we've split the difference. For a contract like Desir's or Perriman's we have to guess on how many of the incentives will count against the cap and for McGovern, we can only estimate what the initial cap hit might be.

Once you've added these up but then added back about $5 million for minimum salaries dropping out due to the Top-51 rule. That would leave us with between $10 million and $15 million in current cap space.

Remember, the Johnson cut will give the Jets another $11 million of cap space on 1 June but this is not accounted for yet in the OTC or official figures. And there may, of course, be cap saving cuts to come either in the next few months or during training camp.