As expected, the Pittsburgh Steelers have had to provide several injury settlements to players so far this summer. In fact, at the time of this post, a total of eight players have been waived or released from the team’s Reserve/Injured list with injury settlements. On Wednesday morning, the first of those several injury settlements began hitting the NFLPA public salary cap sheet.
On Wednesday, the Steelers lost $83,889 in 2024 salary cap space. While the sheet does not tell you which player or players those charges belong to, deductive reason leads me to believe that the total belongs to injury settlements given to WR Keilahn Harris and DB Luq Barcoo, especially with those players being the first two to be waived from the Reserve/Injured list with injury settlements.
Based on the NFL’s CBA split salary chart, it appears as though Harris received a two-week injury settlement of $55,000. Now, I must caution that there is some uncertainty here. Why? Well, there is uncertainty on whether Harris has one credited season or not and that stems from him being terminated by the Atlanta Falcons in October 2023 with an injury settlement. If that settlement were for three weeks or more, which it likely was, he would have one credited season and thus his split salary with the Steelers while on their Reserve/Injured list would match a two-week injury settlement amount of $55,000.
As for the remaining $28,889, that would match a possible one-week injury settlement for Barcoo, who was on the Steelers’ Reserve/Injured list on a split salary of $520,000.
If you’re scoring at home, Harris was given his injury settlement on May 28 while Barcoo was given his on June 12.
The main takeaway of this post is that a few injury settlements have now hit the NFLPA public salary cap sheet, and more are on the way. The bad part is that I am forced to guess who those injury settlements belong to and for how many weeks they are for as they are charged off. This makes the tasks extremely hard overall.
In the end, and definitely by Week 2 of the 2024 NFL regular season, we should know the total amount of all offseason injury settlements.
The list of players given injury settlements this summer include Harris, Barcoo, ILB Tyler Murray, DT Breiden Fehoko, DB Nate Meadors, DB Kalon Barnes, WR Tarik Black, and DB Grayland Arnold.
The Steelers are $15,772,690 under the cap in their Rule of 51 as of Wednesday morning pending more injury settlement amounts being accounted for. The team also has two players on the Reserve/Injured list in OLB David Perales and OL Nate Herbig.
