The Arizona Cardinals are looking to take another leap in 2025. With head coach Jonathan Gannon entering into his third season with the team and obvious progress from 2023 to 2024, Arizona's outlook this season is that of a franchise seeking a breakthrough. They could get it, too, thanks to a vasty ...
Cardinals hold major team-building edge over every NFC West rival in 2025, creating a clearer road to a long-term competitive window originally appeared on A to Z Sports.
The Arizona Cardinals are looking to take another leap in 2025. With head coach Jonathan Gannon entering into his third season with the team and obvious progress from 2023 to 2024, Arizona's outlook this season is that of a franchise seeking a breakthrough. They could get it, too, thanks to a vasty overhauled front seven and a young nucleus of talent on offense.
It's a popular opinion in professional football that the most direct pathway to the postseason is to excel against your divisional opponents. It makes sense, too, given that these are the teams that you're guaranteed two matchups against each year — never mind the suddenly controversial arrangement that division winners host playoff games each winter.
There's one area where the Cardinals are doing laps around their NFC West counterparts — although there's no guarantee that it will be the thing that pushes Arizona atop the division in 2025.
Arizona's dead cap charges are dwarfed by all three NFC West rivals in 2025
Salary cap accounting is a complex beast. But here's one thing that can be easily understood. When you pay a player cash and prorate out the cap charges into future years, all of that money must be accounted for when the player is no longer under contract with the team. This cap commitment is referred to as 'dead cap', salary cap bookkeeping dollars that must be ate in order to pay the debts of past deferment of salary.
Some dead cap is healthy. As a matter of fact, half of the league's top-10 in dead cap charges from 2024 made the postseason, including the eventual Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. But the absence of dead cap ensures that a team has maximum amounts of flexibility with their salary cap long-term.
The Cardinals? They have almost no dead cap at all in 2025. The rest of the NFC West? Well...that's a different story.
The West division as a whole has approximately $225.6 million in dead cap charges this season. Arizona is responsible for $7.39 million of it, which ranks 31st among all teams in the NFL. San Francisco leads the pack with over $95 million in dead cap charges for names like Deebo Samuel, Charvarius Ward, Arik Armstead, Leonard Floyd, and (many) others. The Seattle Seahawks have the fourth-highest dead cap charge of any team in the league right now, boasting $72.2 million in dead cap charges. Their marquee dead cap charges include DK Metcalf, Dre'Mont Jones, Geno Smith, and Tyler Lockett. The Rams rank 10th in the NFL in dead cap, clocking just over $50 million. Cooper Kupp, Joe Noteboom, Aaron Donald, and Jonah Jackson are their only dead cap charges.
The salary cap is fluid, flexible, and oftentimes negotiable. But once cash is paid, it must be tallied eventually. Once players leave the roster, debts must be paid. Arizona can enjoy this significant edge in their spending power and long-term strategy in 2025, with the hopes that it can paint a rosy long-term future that affords them a chance to spend competitively for years to come before having their own debts to balance up. That's the circle of life in the NFL — and Arizona just so happens to sit on the other side of it from the rest of their rivals in 2025.
This story was originally reported by A to Z Sports on Aug 20, 2025, where it first appeared.
Category: Football
