Draft Picks, projected cap costs and cap space (sorta long)

I was curious to see how bad our situation is in terms of roster, draft picks and available cap space.

For draft pick order, I used tankathon's listed draft order here https://www.tankathon.com/nfl/full_draft

For projected cap costs for each pick, I used Sportrac's info here https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/draft/2021/round-1/

For projected 2022 cap space, like others, I used that from over the cap here https://overthecap.com/salary-cap/new-york-giants/

As this was mostly a data gathering exercise, I had to look at 2021 cap hits of draft picks and then project based on escalations shown at Sportrac. These are the best approximations I could arrive at. It assumes a 12.3% wage increase for 2022 draft picks relative to the 2021 cap charges.

At present, we have 2.06 million of cap space with a projected roster of only 42 players. This does not include draft picks or any other players needed to field a functional roster or practice squad. Yes, it's not ideal.

As a first cut, I looked at what our draft picks will be and what the 2021 cap charges were by draft slot and projected the increase to 2022. This is the reasonable approximation of what our draft class will cost by slot and total:

pardon the formatting, bbi code is not friendly to tables

Draft 2021 Cap 2022 Cap
Pick Cost Cost
5 5603571 6308105
7 4381649 4923163
36 1584802 1780525
67 949473 1066732
80 905606 1017448
109 859951 966154
145 749505 842068
170 733971 824616
182 720038 808962

Total 16488566 18537777

It is pretty clear that we need to free up between 14 and 16 million just to sign our draft picks as slotted. That would bring a roster to 51, still well shy of fielding a full roster as well as practice squad and training camp fodder.

One interesting aspect of the cost of the draft picks is over half (60.5%) of the pojected cap hits of the 2022 draft class is in picks 5 and 7.

The incoming GM has a lot of resources but also some interesting decisions to make on resource allocation. I have no idea who in the current organization has ultimately led us to this point, but we are at juncture we can have some nice things but the habits of the previous FO has made it hard to afford them.

Your mileage may vary.