NFL Free Agency 2012 – Likely Some Teams Will Not Pursue Free Agents

With the NFL teams announcing their salary cap amounts heading into 2012 free agency, it has become obvious that some teams will have little or no involvement.

There are four teams currently over the salary cap according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter – Pittsburgh Steelers ($11 million), Oakland Raiders ($11 million), Carolina Panthers ($9 million) and New York Giants ($9 million). Further to this, this New York Jets are at about the limit of the salary cap.

For these teams, they have alot of work to do. In order to get under the cap, they will have to either restructure the contracts of players they already have or make cuts to personnel such as we saw the Raiders do with Stanford Routt. They have until March 13th to do so.

This has a definite impact on free agency. Not only does it mean that these teams likely will not be pursuing free agents but also that they will have trouble re-signing their own free agents.

Affected players include:

• Jake Ballard (Restricted) – Giants
• William Gay – Steelers
• Terrell Thomas – Giants
• Aaron Ross – Giants
• Tyvon Branch – Raiders
• Jim Leonhard – Jets
• Mario Manningham – Giants
• Mike Wallace (Restricted) – Steelers
• Kareem McKenzie – Giants
• Max Starks – Steelers

Keep an eye on these players – at least some of them will have new teams when free agency is over.