The craziest part of NFL free agency is over; most of the big-name guys are off the market.
The Eagles lost some players, but they also brought some players in through FA and trades. But now that the dust has settled after the initial flurry of the new league year, let's take a look at their salary cap situation.
According to the NFLPA, the Eagles have just over $6 million in salary cap space — $6,069,354, to be exact.
After facing a really precarious situation in the lead-up to free agency, Howie Roseman worked his magic. He restructured the deals of Lane Johnson and Zach Ertz to free space, dumped some contracts and then fit in a few new faces.
The Eagles needed to trim around $10 million in cap space before the start of the league year, so saving $7.5 million by restructuring Johnson's contract and another $5.4 million by restructuring Ertz's deal a while later was big.
The Eagles aren't necessarily finished signing free agents — they signed Chris Long and Patrick Robinson at last year's league meetings and those deals ended up being huge. This year's league meetings are next week in Orlando, so maybe there's more to come.
As it stands, the Eagles don't have a ton of room to work with, though. That's not to say they couldn't make something else work. But it's also important to remember that they'll need to have enough space this spring and summer to sign their 2018 draft class.
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The somewhat bright side of having the 32nd pick in the draft without picks in the second or third rounds is that the Eagles don't have to allocate a ton of money to pay their picks. If the Eagles keep all six of their picks and don't get any more, OverTheCap projects their total rookie pool this season to be just over $4.5 million — the lowest total in the NFL.
So if the Eagles don't sign anyone else or if they don't make any other moves, they can still pay their draft picks and have plenty of cap space to carry over to next year.
But the Eagles still have ways to create more cap space this season if they really want to. The most obvious ways are these: extend Brandon Graham or move Mychal Kendricks.
For whatever reason, the Eagles don't seem to be in a hurry to give Graham, their best defensive end, a new contract. In the final year of his deal, Graham has an $8 million cap hit this season. Extending him would give him more money but also allow them to bring down his hit in 2018.
And then there's Kendricks, who is apparently on the trade block for yet another offseason. The Eagles are getting Jordan Hicks back from injury, signed Nigel Bradham to an extremely team-friendly deal (his cap hit is $2 million in 2018) and then brought in Corey Nelson and told him he'd be competing to start at the weakside linebacker spot. That's where Kendricks usually plays. At this point, it wouldn't make a ton of sense to cut Kendricks, but if they trade him, it would free up $4.4 million in space.
As we've said for a while, when it comes to the salary cap, it just doesn't make sense to doubt Roseman. He's good at this stuff.