It’s tough to talk about the state of the New Orleans Saints without mentioning their salary cap outlook. Years of short-term gambles and ill-advised investments have caught up with them, and now they’re in the hole by as much as $70 million — depending on where you check, that number could be closer to $54 million. We’ll know for sure once the NFL announces this year’s spending limit in a few weeks. Over The Cap’s experts predict a cap of $272.5 million, compared to the 2024 limit of $255.4 million, hence the discrepancy.
General manager Mickey Loomis has pushed back on that narrative surrounding his team, but there are some holes in his argument.
“You can’t just say here’s the number, and here’s where they’re over, and that’s a disaster, right?” Loomis said in his end-of-season press conference. “We’ve got the most players under contract of any team. Yes, we’re over, but there’s a lot of teams below us that have, we have 61 players under contract right now, and there’s teams that have cap room but they have 38, or 36. It’s a collective. How much guaranteed is out there? How much is the acceleration that exists? I’m pretty comfortable with where we’re at. I’m comfortably uncomfortable.”
While he’s correct that the team has 61 players under contract right now, that won’t be the case in March. Three of those contracts are set to void at the start of free agency — defensive ends Chase Young and Tanoh Kpassagnon, plus tight end Juwan Johnson, are all on schedule to hit the open market. The Saints have varying incentives to re-sign each of them, but they risk taking on another $17.4 million in dead money if all three walk away. The team already leads the league in dead money spending at $48.4 million.
Another point to remember: while Ryan Ramczyk is technically under contract for 2025, he’s expected to retire this summer after agreeing to cut his salary to the league minimum. That’s the same path we’ve seen the Saints take before with retiring stars like Drew Brees and Malcolm Jenkins. So if you take out these four players between the expiring deals and expected retirement, the Saints really have 57 players under contract. That takes them from being tied for the third-most players under contract at 61 (the Tampa Bay buccaneers and San Francisco 49ers each have 62) to tied with the Buffalo Bills for 12th. The Super Bowl-bound Kansas City Chiefs are the only team with fewer than 40 players under contract (38).
Then you have to consider who those players are. This is a team that went 5-12 last year. They haven’t won 10 games in a single season since Drew Brees retired. Keeping that group together isn’t exactly a selling point. This roster needs a youth movement in a big way, and of the 57 on track to compete at training camp, how many will stick on the 53-man roster in September? Every team would love to have a draft like the Saints did in 2006 and 2017, but those only come around once a decade (if that). We can’t just assume they’ll draft a bunch of impact players this April.
Still, it helps to know what you’re looking for. Let’s go under the hood and look at each position group: