The Jets enter this offseason in a much different financial position than they did a year ago. Last year, new general manager Mike Maccagnan had money to shop for free agents who had Fifth Avenue price tags. This year? It should be more like the bargain bin.
The Jets are currently projected to have $10 million to $16 million in salary cap space, depending on the precise 2016 salary cap figure, which will be established next month. There are some ways to create more space through cutting players or reworking deals, but they also have a few high-profile free agents of their own they are expected to re-sign.
“It’s kind of a little different scenario from last year to this year,” Maccagnan said last week. “We’ll still have money to be active and do things with, but it ends up being like a puzzle and it’s not only trying to put all the pieces in different scenarios.
“There’s not a perfect answer to it, but what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to maximize your opportunity cost, so that’s where as we go through this, we’re going through all these different scenarios of how we’re going to attack free agency. The main goal is to keep as much of it in place on our team as we can, but the way free agency works itself out, eventually when players hit the market, you can’t determine where sometimes guys are going to be paid and you may have a certain point where you feel like that’s a little above where you want to pay.”
Before free agency arrives on March 9, Maccagnan has plenty of work to do. The first order of business is clearing some more cap space. He can cut or negotiate a pay cut with corner Antonio Cromartie ($8 million cap figure) and tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson ($14.1 million) to clear some room. Players whose roles were dramatically reduced this year, such as wide receiver Jeremy Kerley ($3.1 million) and tight end Jeff Cumberland ($1.9 million), also could be released.
Maccagnan should be able to get the cap space to around $30 million. Then the issue becomes how much to spend on the Jets’ own free agents and how much to save for those from other teams. If Maccagnan uses the franchise tag on defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson, as expected, that would eat up around half of their cap space. The franchise number for defensive ends is expected to be around $16 million.
The other pending free agents the Jets are expected to try to re-sign are quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick and nose tackle Damon Harrison. Running backs Chris Ivory and Bilal Powell are also set to become free agents. It does not seem likely the Jets can keep all of them.
“We obviously made progress from 4-12 a year ago to 10-6. We have some really good parts in place,” Maccagnan said. “We just need to kind of figure out what the best combination of all those things are going forward. The only difference this year would be that last year, we knew we were going to be more active because we had a lot of cap room. This year, we do have cap room still. It’ll have to be one of those ones where we determine if certain guys are available or not available, we may try to have contingency plans as the market kind of works itself out.”
The best avenue for the Jets to take may be to re-sign their priority free agents, then shop for bargains in free agency and wait until the draft to fill the remaining holes.
“The real driver in any team’s success, ideally, is the draft,” Maccagnan said. “From our standpoint, we always have an idea that we want to do things in free agency that can impact us and help us and help us along. But in a perfect world, it’s kind of the younger guys and, that’s where I think, it’s not just the guys that you sign in free agency and the guys you retain.”