The dust has settled on the Arizona Cardinals' offseason, and it's been quite busy.
After missing the postseason, the Cardinals put their plethora of cap space and draft picks to good use - notably on the defensive side of the ball - to improve their odds of making the postseason in 2025.
While most of the moves Arizona wanted to make are behind them, the Cardinals could still add a free agent or two between now and the regular season. Trading for an outside player also remains a possibility.
Entering the offseason workout portion of the schedule, where do the Cardinals rank in terms of cap space?
*All figures are via OverTheCap and are valid as of May 10*
Current NFL Cap Space Rankings
These rankings use "effective cap space", which is defined as the cap space a team will have after signing 51 players and their rookie class.
1. New England Patriots: $57.9 million
2. San Francisco 49ers: $40.1 million
3. Detroit Lions: $39 million
4. Pittsburgh Steelers: $31 million
5. Las Vegas Raiders: $28.9 million
6. Tennessee Titans: $28.33 million
7. Seattle Seahawks: $28.30 million
8. Arizona Cardinals: $27.8 million
9. Green Bay Packers: $27.3 million
10. Dallas Cowboys: $26.9 million
Out of those teams, the Cardinals have the most players signed (89) ahead of training camp with the second-lowest amount of dead money ($7.3 million) on the books.
It was a masterful offseason by general manager Monti Ossenfort, who says the team is looking for competition everywhere - even if most additions came via upgrading their defense:
“I think we're trying to upgrade our team everywhere. I think you're always at the mercy of what the supply is. So, we set our free agency board much like we set our draft board, and you try to pick the best spots where we're going to expend our resources," he said.
"Certainly, we want to increase competition, we want to increase the talent level across all our positions. It just so happens that obviously we wanted to get better on the defensive front, there's no question about that. We had some opportunities to do that. Our needs matched up with what the supply was and free agency and then continued that through the draft. We want to improve everywhere across the board. It just so happened that we had more opportunities to do that defensively this cycle.”
Teams typically like to carry north of $5 million entering the regular season just in case they need to make an emergency move. If a team doesn't spend all of their cap, they can roll it over to the following offseason. However, teams must spent 89% of their cap space over a four-year period.
Arizona handed out a total of $179.1 million in contracts this free agency period, which ranks seventh in the league. The Cardinals have also signed four of their seven draft picks thus far.
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