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Not necessarily if they all sign end-heavy contracts - again I would advice not to look at the cap space as a concrete limit of how much they can spend on next year's real salaries, but as a limit under which Loomis and the FO have to fit the short term salaries of the roster. They have numerous ways of doing it, none of which even include releasing players or restructuring contracts.

Jankman8

What is going to happen with the salary cap in 2014? Someone mentioned a hefty raise?

FinSaint

The make up of the salary cap is quite complicated to try and explain, but basically the annual cap is based on the income that teams earn during a league year.

In the newest CBA the sources of that income have been expanded greatly from what they used to be under the old CBA, and now that annual income is calculated by the income created by "all revenues" (AR).

This "all revenues" (AR) category now includes pretty much all of the various revenue streams available, like: ticket sales, revenue from luxury box suites and premium seating, local and national broadcasting (TV/radio/Internet) royalties, concessions, parking, local advertising, stadium leasing, and merchadising.

The projected AR pretty much determines the eventual salary cap for all the 32 teams in the league - after some complicated calculations we are left with an "unadjusted salary cap per team" - and this is where the new percentages of division of the annual revenue between the players and the owners also matters the most, because it is the players' percentage of the annual revenue that is used to calculate the salary cap.

So, to finally answer your initial question: The NFL negotiated a new TV deal with the major North-American TV channels that show NFL games on a weekly basis - CBS, FOX, and NBC - which will continue until the 2022 season. With this new TV deal, these three networks have to pay the NFL an annual fee of $1B/each, making the annual revenue from those three alone $3.1 billion/year, representing a 63% increase over the $1.9 billion paid annually by CBS, FOX and NBC under their current contracts. Also, two months earlier, the NFL signed a new deal with Disney's ESPN channel, which increases its annual fee to $1.9 billion from the $1.1 billion it used to be.

The new TV contract officially begins after the 2013 season, which is why the AR is going to see a formidable "jump up" and cause the annual per team salary cap to increase quite drastically.

Sorry for the long explanation/answer, but I wanted to make the causal relationship between the new TV deal and the annual salary cap as clear as possible.

"I'm not bashing people, I'm bashing their opinions because in my opinion their opinion is wrong" - Danno