NFL Trade Rumors
Today we’re wrapping up our six-part series on the teams with the worst salary cap situations in 2026, and it’s only fitting that we do it with the franchise responsible for the phrase “salary cap hell” entering the lexicon of the average NFL fan.
While the Saints are a long way away from the massive budget deficits they seemed to carry annually in the last decade, they still have a bit of work to do. They’re one of six teams with deficits in the neighborhood of $25 million or more in effective cap space in 2026, per Over The Cap.
Effective cap space is a neat house metric from OTC that accounts for how much budget teams should have next year after filling out a full roster and signing their draft class. The NFL mandates all teams stay below the salary cap at all times, so these six teams have to get back in the black by the time the 2026 league year starts in March. That means each squad has some decisions to make, and those implications are what we’re exploring in this series.
While the Saints and the salary cap have been a punchline for years and years, the truth is the organization probably deserves much of the credit for being on the cutting edge when it comes to finding ways to create a competitive edge through its cap management. The idea behind the NFL salary cap is that every team is on a level playing field when it comes to money, whether it’s a big market like Dallas or a smaller one like Phoenix. In theory, that should prevent those teams with access to more revenue from being able to just spend their way to a title. Everyone has the same budget and the team that makes the best spending decisions has a leg up in building the best team.
(The other big benefit of a salary cap from an NFL owner’s perspective is that it suppresses overall wages for players more than a true free market would, but that’s a different discussion.)
However, the Saints realized something important at some point in the 2010s, as in the wake of the 2011 lockout that led to a new CBA, the league’s revenue took off. As a result, so did the salary cap, growing several percentage points at a time. The central tenet undergirding the Saints’ strategy — and the strategy several other teams have now adopted — is that a dollar against the cap today is worth more than a dollar against the cap tomorrow since it accounts for a bigger percentage. As a result, there’s more incentive to maximize space in any current season since the purchasing power is greater.
That strategy required ownership to be more comfortable spending cash now that would be accounted for against the cap...
