Buffalo Bills get good news about salary cap for 2021 season

While there is still plenty of uncertainty about what the salary cap might be this season, the Buffalo Bills did get a piece of good news on Thursday. According to reports, including the tweet from ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the NFL has sent out a memo to NFL teams that the salary cap floor has increased by $5 million from $175 million to $180 million.

Last offseason, with a number of questions about what the season might look like, the NFL and NFL Players Association agreed that the salary cap for this coming season would not drop lower than $175 million.

The news on Thursday though said that the floor is increased by $5 million but could go up even more once the final 2020 revenue figures are reviewed.

This increase is good news for the Buffalo Bills as they were expected to have limited cap space this offseason. According to Over the Cap, while the increase does help, if the cap is only $180.5 million the Bills would still be a little over $1 million over the cap.

General manager Brandon Beane and the front office are going to have some tough decisions to make this offseason to not only get the team under the cap but create enough space to potentially sign some of their own free agents, like Matt Milano, Jon Feliciano or Daryl Williams, or sign other free agents.

One of those other free agents could be defensive end J.J. Watt, who the Bills have reportedly shown interest in signing this offseason.

The team could try to restructure some contracts but that would require players to agree to such a move. The other option would be to release some players and while that creates cap space it would likely create dead cap that would impact the salary cap this year, and potentially future seasons.

The news on Thursday, while it doesn’t necessarily address all these issues, getting the Bills within a million of the salary cap should be good news for the front office this coming offseason.