This next week will certainly be an interesting one for the Pittsburgh Steelers as not only will the team need to trim their active roster down to 53 active players, but they will also need to establish a full 16-man practice squad. On top of that, the Steelers will need to get their 2023 salary cap plan finalized before Week 1, meaning that they will need to decide on how much initial free space they want to carry for the season. With it being a busy week ahead, let’s take one final look at the Steelers’ salary cap situation before all hell breaks loose these next few days.
Currently, the Steelers are $10,481,563 under the cap and that amount is pending the amounts of the two players recently waived from the Reserve/Injured list with settlements in WR Cody White and WR Hakeem Butler. Those injury settlements won’t be much, probably a max each of $83,333, but those amounts will go against the cap when they finally hit, which will likely be on Monday or Tuesday.
While roughly $10.4 million is a lot of salary cap space, the Steelers will still need to accommodate a 52nd and 53rd player under the cap as the Rule of 51 will soon be ending on Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. ET. Additionally, the team’s 16-player practice squad will need to be accounted for soon and that will come to around $4 million. On top of that, the players that are on the team’s Reserve/Injured list by Tuesday afternoon will also count against the salary cap. As of this post, that additional total amount is $1.875 million.
Among all the things that I have mentioned so far that are forthcoming salary cap charges, we’re looking at roughly an additional $7.5 million that needs to be accounted for soon against the team’s salary cap this next week.
Now, the Steelers are likely to part ways with a few players that currently sit in their top 51. The most notable players to maybe watch out for in the next few days are G Kevin Dotson, DT Montravius Adams, WR Gunner Olszewski as all are set to earn base salaries of $2 million or more in 2023. Those three players would present the more notable salary cap savings, all not massive amounts, however, after roster displacement takes place, should any of them have their contracts terminated or traded in these next few days. Sure, other cuts or trades from the top 51 might also save a little bit of salary cap space, but after roster displacement takes place for each, it won’t be a huge amount. Every penny does count just the same and it all adds up.
The byproduct of the roster cutdown to 53, combined with the determined amount that the Steelers want to have free in salary cap space for Week One, will then determine whether the team needs to restructure the contract of outside linebacker T.J. Watt and to what degree if they indeed need to go that route.
At this point, it certainly seems like the Steelers might not need to do a full restructuring of Watt’s contract, which would produce $12,613,334 in additional salary cap space. This was the case last year as well and the Steelers wound up only doing a partial restructuring on Watt, a move that created up $6.75 million in cap space right before the start of the 2022 regular season. Once again, it all depends on how much free salary cap space that GM Omar Khan decides he wants to enter the 2023 regular season with. I have been using a budget of $9 million all offseason, but Khan could have other ideas. Depending on how things play out with roster cuts, there’s at least a tiny chance that Watt’s contract won’t need restructuring at all. We’ll see.
Unfortunately, the NFLPA salary cap page does not update in real-time so any surprises that might come in over the course of the next several days as far as additional injury settlements and the similar, will be hard to track specifically until fully reported. Even so, my daily tracking of the team’s salary cap situation should allow me to present a fairly accurate report of how much salary cap space the Steelers have come Week One of the regular season. Stay tuned.
