With the Indianapolis Colts on their bye week, let’s take a peek ahead to the 2025 offseason, and what their salary cap situation might look like.
According to Over the Cap, the Colts are set to have $49.765 million in cap space next offseason. While that sounds like a lot of room, that actually ranks as the 16th-most.
Now, of course, there are ways for the Colts to create space in order to have additional room. One is by releasing a veteran player whose cap hit is larger than their dead cap hit, which would save cap space.
An example of this would be Braden Smith, who if on the team has a cap hit of $19.75 million. If released, his dead cap hit–or money that stays on the books even if cut–is only $3 million. Meaning, the Colts would create $16.75 million in additional cap space if they moved on from him.
Two other avenues of creating cap space can come via contract restructures or sometimes even extensions.
With a restructure, the team is essentially kicking the salary cap can down the road, by taking current year’s cap charges and pushing them into future contract years.
In an extension, with new years added to a current deal, that gives team an avenue–somewhat like a restructure–to push cap charges to future years, thus helping to lower the current year’s cap hit.
In addition to all of that, any unused cap space from the current year is rolled over to the following year. As of now, the Colts have $10.647 million in unused cap space that could be added to their 2025 total.
Then the question becomes, how aggressive does GM Chris Ballard get in free agency?
This past year, he prioritized re-signing his own. And while around the NFL the best teams are built through the draft with free agency used to supplement the roster, that heavy approach has left the Colts with some underperforming or thin position groups.
The growth that we’ve seen from Anthony Richardson in recent weeks has been extremely encouraging, especially given the short time frame. This next offseason will be important in helping the Colts go from being a fringe playoff team to where that is the expectation.
To see which Colts players are set to be free agents in 2025 click here. To see who the top free agents around the NFL are at each position group in 2025, click here.
