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Late Tuesday night, making the rounds with executives and gossiping about the NFL's explosion of COVID infections week.

I was able to go on a thankful little detour with a general manager when the league's forthcoming salary bump in 2022 came up in a conversation.

The league's news was delivered to franchises earlier Tuesday, and as expected, it was good.

A 14% jump kind of good, putting in a $208.2 million salary cap for teams, plus whatever cap space they can roll over from this season into next.

Immediately, I knew that meant there would be plenty of money in the system next offseason, but this particular GM's team, like most, has an active salary cap model that gets adjusted almost daily to keep track of what other teams will have to spend in 2022.

So he says to me, guess how much cap space is out there right now?

I didn't have cap figures in front of me, I stammered a little bit while I was trying to pull something up on my computer, and once he achieved the desired suspense, he dropped the figure.

A billion dollars, he said.

Wait, what?

I was a little incredulous. That seemed wrong, especially given that we're coming off a season where the cap was drawn back to 182.5 million because of a pandemic revenue.

Even with the huge percentage jump, the cap was still basically getting back into line with what it would have been if there had been no 2020 COVID fallout, and the league's bottom line hadn't been hammered.

But I did the math, he's right, at this moment in time, with cap space teams will be rolling over.

There's a billion dollars in cap space just sitting there, waiting for fat extensions and a free agency bonanza like we've never seen before.

And it actually makes some sense when you consider what happened last off season.

The league got this fat piggy bank largely because spending was fairly curved in last off season's free agency, and a litany of players who normally would have gotten solid contracts, ended up signing one year deals.

Mostly because the market was soft and their agents kept telling them this cap explosion was likely to happen in only one year, a huge cap jump, a ton of free cash, and an exponentially better chance to reel in the payday they were looking for.

And so they will.

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