Packers 2023 Roster Very Top Heavy from Salary Cap Perspective
By Paul Bretl
If NFL teams draft good players, eventually, the time is going to come for those players to get paid. And while many are more focused than they ever have been on the salary cap, specifically, how teams are going to navigate it, the fact that the Green Bay Packers continue handing out big contracts to former draft picks is a good problem to have.
Since the summer prior to the 2020 season, we’ve seen David Bakhtiari, Kenny Clark, Aaron Jones, Aaron Rodgers, Preston Smith, and most recently, Jaire Alexander all received big paydays, including several that made a few of these aforementioned players the highest paid at their respective positions.
In addition to handing out those big deals, with how Green Bay typically structures their contracts, the further down the road they get, the larger each of those cap hits will become. And this rings especially true over the last two offseasons where Brian Gutekunst and Russ Ball have leveraged void years on a number of contracts to create cap space in the moment, but that also creates larger cap hits to deal with down the road.
The end result of all of these various moves is a 2023 Green Bay Packers roster that is going to be very top-heavy from a salary cap perspective.
In 2023, according to Over the Cap, the Packers will have five players with a cap hit over $20 million–including Bakhtiari with a cap hit of $29.06 million and Rodgers with a cap hit of $31.62 million. Then there is Smith, whose cap hit is at $13.04 million, and Rashan Gary, who, on a fifth-year option, has a cap hit of $10.89 million. Add it all up, and the eight largest cap hits on Green Bay’s roster next season account for $148.59 million in cap charges.
While the salary cap is expected to take a big jump in 2023 because of the new TV deals, for some context, the salary cap ceiling in 2022 is $208.2 million.
Now, as always, there are ways to create cap space–it’s not as if each of these players are going to carry these exact charges into the 2023 season. As they do every year, Green Bay can restructure contracts, and there is also the possibility that they cut Aaron Jones, which will create over $10.4 million in cap space next year.
Extending Gary, just as the Packers did with Alexander, will lower his 2023 cap hit as well. However, with both Gary and Elgton Jenkins in-store for big paydays of their own, those are two more big contracts for Green Bay to fit on the books in the coming years–although each of their respective cap hits in 2023 will be very manageable, given how the Packers backload their contracts.
When it comes to the salary cap taking a jump next offseason, David Lombardi of The Athletic ($$) projects that it could end up in the $220 to $225 million range–which will obviously help Green Bay deal with the numerous large cap hits that they have.
Again, the purpose of this article isn’t to spread doom and gloom about the Packers’ salary cap situation moving forward–having to pay top of market value for past draft picks is a great thing and something that every team hopes that they have to deal with.
However, I did want to point out that from a salary cap perspective, this is a very top-heavy roster, which will require some financial creativity when it comes to rounding out the rest of the roster–specifically the back-end.