This is huge. The NFL announced that it has reached an agreement with YouTube TV to carry its popular “Sunday Ticket” package carrying out-of-market games, bringing in more than $2 billion per year to the league’s coffers over the next seven years. The service has been with DirecTV since 1994 but will move to the YouTube TV streaming platform in 2023.
And that’s great news for big spenders like the New Orleans Saints. Few teams invest as many resources against the salary cap as the Saints do each year by restructuring contracts and paying out hefty signing bonuses. The higher the salary cap goes, the better for them.
We still don’t know what the cap will look like for 2023, with some costs deferred from the COVID-19-imapcted seasons in 2020 and 2021 coming due soon. The 2022 salary cap hit a record-high of $208.2 million, and speculation has suggested the 2023 spending limit might approach $220 million. With the league reeling in more money through new broadcast rights contracts with conventional TV stations plus digital streaming services like Amazon Prime Video (for Thursday night games) and YouTube TV (for out-of-market fans), the cap is probably going to the moon in the years ahead.
Which brings us back to the Saints. No team has more money on the books for 2023 than New Orleans, per Over The Cap, at a staggering $277.8 million. The Saints will need to get creative yet again in manipulating contracts and pushing money around just to reach cap compliance, and there are going to be cap casualties along the way.
That’s the downside to taking such an aggressive approach in building a team. It’s hard to complain about that strategy when you’re getting results (as the Saints did from 2017 to 2020, winning 49 of their 64 regular season games), but you aren’t doing yourself any favors when the on-field product is not competitive (which has been the case during their 14-17 run the last two years). Hopefully the financial boosts from these new broadcasting deals kick in soon and lend the Saints a helping hand.
