The Denver Broncos have done virtually nothing in free agency thus far, and still have all the major roster holes that they did when the season ended. Their plans for 2024 have been revealed in FA so far. In a year where the Broncos have created a substantial amount of cap space, the team has not used it.
According to Over The Cap, the Broncos have nearly $45 million in available space, and their most recent efforts to create space included restructuring the contracts of Zach Allen and Ben Powers. A lot of us quickly thought that the Broncos had something big in mind, as they were not in a financial pinch that warranted them restructuring deals.
Before those restructures, the team was in the $30 million cap space range. Well, on Tuesday, day two of free agency, besides re-signing some of their own players, the team signed one external free agent, a talented run stuffer named Malcolm Roach from the New Orleans Saints. In fact, Roach seems to be an elite run stopper:
Malcolm Roach had 23 stops — tackles constituting a “failure” for the opposing offense — against the run last year.
— Andrew Mason (@MaseDenver) March 12, 2024
That gave him a run-stop percentage of 17.4 percent — 23 on 139 run-defense snaps, per @PFF data.
That’s No. 1 among interior defensive linemen in the NFL.
However, with just two free agency signings in Roach and Brandon Jones, it's clear that the Denver Broncos are looking ahead to the 2025 NFL Season. It's obvious that Sean Payton and the Broncos want to just squeeze by in 2024 with as little financial strain as possible, hence the cheap free agent additions.
And they'd do this perhaps because of Russell Wilson's contract and the dead money they have to eat:
So, Spotrac has the Broncos with $43M of cap space. OvertheCap has them at $46M.
— Andrew Mason (@MaseDenver) March 12, 2024
If they take the larger hit on Russell Wilson this year — $53M — that eats up $17.6M of it to cover what’s not already accounted for. Rookie pool will be roughly $13M. Boom — $30.6M of space gone. https://t.co/f9TiYuYbx6
The Denver Broncos could have created all of this cap space, approaching $50 million, because they want to rip the Band-Aid off with Wilson's contract and begin their ascent next offseason. That could be a plausible reason. I have personally thought that there was no way Sean Payton wanted to tarnish his strong regular season record and engage in a full rebuild, which typically means at least one significant losing season.
I was predicting that the Broncos would try to copy the Houston Texans rebuild; before CJ Stroud came aboard in 2023, the roster was already filled with modestly priced veteran talent, making the transition for Stroud much easier. However, the Broncos don't seem to be taking that approach.
Right now, my best guess is that they just want to get Russell Wilson's contract off of their books as soon as possible, so creating a mountain of cap space as they have won't be used to make significant free agency additions.