Ideally, teams would rather get long-term extensions done with players as early as possible. If you’ve been following how the Philadelphia Eagles built their championship roster, one of their core principles is to pay their players as soon as they’re eligible for extensions — due to the current NFL salary cap landscape.
At the moment, the salary cap is rising about $20 million to $25 million per year, which is expected to continue until new television contracts come up in 2029. By then, streaming services, which now have better tracking data on NFL viewership, will be major players and should lead to a massive boom for the league — potentially at the cost of consumers’ pockets.