Annually, one specific area where there is a ton of misinformation concerning the Pittsburgh Steelers’ salary cap situation revolves around how much space the team will need to accommodate their draft class being signed. So, because of that, and with the NFL releasing the official 2024 draft order on Friday, let me lay out the facts concerning the Steelers’ class and cap space needed to sign the members of it.
Currently, the Steelers are scheduled to have seven selections in the 2024 NFL Draft. Thanks to the fine folks at Over the Cap, we already have a very good idea as to what those seven contracts should look like for those players, assuming the Steelers stand pat with their current selections. You can see the layout of the 2024 projected details for all seven picks below. This layout includes the base salary amounts, signing bonus proration amounts and total cap charge amounts for each of the 2024 selections. It should be pretty straight forward.
Now, the total of the cap charges for those seven selections is projected to be $9,277,525 and that’s probably a number, or one close to it, some of you have seen passed around on other sites when it comes to how much salary cap room the Steelers will need to accommodate the complete signing of the draft class. Well, that’s not how it works.
The NFL works off the Rule of 51 during the offseason. That Rule of 51 is the total of the top 51 cap charges a team has plus any bonus proration amounts that fall outside of the top 51. Understood?
For any draft pick contract that does successfully enter the Rule of 51 at signing, it would then displace the contract that is listed 51st. That old 51st ranked contract would then fall outside of the Rule of 51 and the only way any of it counts against the cap is if there is any signing bonus proration included in it.
Currently, $795,000 is the number to top to get into the Steelers’ Rule of 51 for the 2024 draft class. That amount could obviously change depending on how many more signings or deletions the Steelers have. For now, however, that’s the number to top.
So, as you can see in the attached table above, all the Steelers seven scheduled draft picks have projected 2024 cap charge totals that would enter the team’s current Rule of 51. Those seven cap charges, which once again total out at $9,277,525, would displace the seven lowest cap charges currently in the Rule of 51 if all of them were immediately signed and nothing else where to change.
The current total of the base salaries of those seven lowest charges that those seven draft picks would displace is $6,165,000. So, those seven draft picks would eat an additional $3,112,525 of salary cap space as we sit here today. See how we got that amount?
If you want a lazier way to roughly figure this amount out, just take the total number of draft picks, and multiply it by the rookie minimum salary for the given year and then subtract it from the projected salary cap total of all draft picks for the given year. In this lazy example, you would multiply seven picks by $795,000 and then subtract that total from $9,277,525. That math works out to $3,712,525, which at least gets you much closer to the actual number of $3,112,525, which revolves around the current Rule of 51 .
I hope I have explained this well and helped to clear out the misinformation that’s being circulated by members of the Pittsburgh media and other Steelers’ blogs.
