Economics
The NFL rookie wage scale explained: a fixed price list
How the NFL rookie wage scale works: the two pools, the 25 per cent rule, four-year proration, the fifth-year option tiers and the terms banned outright.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Economics19 min read
A first-round pick signs his rookie contract, the figure gets reported to the dollar, and the language used is the language of negotiation. Terms were agreed. A deal was reached. In fact almost nothing was agreed. The length of the contract was set by the collective bargaining agreement, the total was set by where his name was called, the shape of the four years was set by an escalation limit, and the club and the agent spent their time on payment dates and a paragraph of guarantee language.
The NFL rookie wage scale is the reason for that, and it is more interesting than the phrase suggests. It is not a table of salaries. It is a second salary cap, sitting inside the first, with its own pool, its own per-club allocation, its own arithmetic, and its own list of contract terms that may not be written at all.
Understand those four things and you can price any draft slot to within a rounding error, explain why every rookie deal has the same silhouette, and see exactly where the small amount of remaining negotiation actually happens.
What the NFL rookie wage scale actually caps
Start with what it does not do. The scale does not set a maximum salary for a rookie by name, and it does not publish a per-pick price list signed by both sides. What it caps is money in aggregate, twice.
The first cap is league-wide. The agreement defines a Total Rookie Compensation Pool, which is the ceiling on all rookie salary that all 32 clubs may contract for across the whole term of the deals they sign in a given draft. Alongside it sits a Year-One Rookie Compensation Pool, which is the ceiling on rookie salary in the first year of those contracts only. Two pools, one measuring the whole commitment and one measuring the immediate cap consequence.
The second cap is per club. Each club receives a Total Rookie Allocation and a Year-One Rookie Allocation, which are its proportional shares of the two league pools, calculated from the number, round and position of its draft selections. A club with two first-round picks gets a larger allocation than a club with none. A club that traded down four times gets a lot of small slices instead of one big one.
Inside a club's allocation, each individual pick carries a Year-One Formula Allotment: a fraction, expressed as a percentage of the pool, calculated from the round and position of that pick. That is the number people mean when they say a pick is "slotted". It is not a dollar figure written in the agreement. It is a share of a pool whose size is recalculated every year.
There is also a floor. The agreement defines a Year-One Minimum Allotment, an absolute minimum share for a pick based on its round and position, which stops the formula grinding the back of the seventh round down to nothing as the pool composition shifts.
- 4Contract years for a drafted rookie
- 3Contract years for an undrafted rookie
- 4Maximum years a rookie signing bonus may prorate over
- 25Maximum annual rise, as a percentage of year-one salary
All four are set in Article 7 of the collective bargaining agreement rather than negotiated between club and player.
The point of building it this way, rather than publishing a fixed price for the eleventh pick, is that the pool moves with the salary cap and the allotments move with it automatically. Nobody has to renegotiate the scale when revenue jumps. The percentages hold and the dollars follow.
Why the total pool is exactly 5.5 times the first-year pool
Here is the piece of arithmetic that explains the shape of every rookie contract in the league, and it is sitting in plain sight in the definitions.
For the league years running from 2021 to 2030, the Total Rookie Compensation Pool is set at the Year-One Rookie Compensation Pool multiplied by 5.5. Four-year contracts, and a multiplier of five and a half rather than four.
That is not a fudge factor. It is the sum of the steepest legal escalation path.
The agreement caps the annual increase in a rookie's salary at 25 per cent of his Year-One Rookie Salary. Not 25 per cent compounding, and not 25 per cent of the previous year: 25 per cent of the first year, every year, which produces a straight line rather than a curve. Take a first year of 1. The maximum second year is 1.25. The maximum third is 1.50. The maximum fourth is 1.75. Add them: 5.5.
The total pool is therefore the exact size of a world in which every drafted player takes the maximum increase in every year. It is the year-one pool with the escalation limit already baked into it. That is why the two numbers are not independent, why nobody argues about the multiplier, and why a club cannot buy back space in the total pool by flattening a contract, since the ceiling was calculated on the assumption that it would not.
Read the chart and you have the silhouette of every rookie contract in the sport. Rising, evenly, at a rate nobody chose. There is no back-loaded rookie deal, no balloon year four, no lump hidden in the last season. The scale forbids the shape, not just the amount.
The 25 per cent rule counts the bonus as well, and that changes everything
The escalation limit would be a mild constraint if it applied only to base salary. It does not.
The base for the calculation is Year-One Rookie Salary, and that means the player's first-year paragraph 5 salary plus the first year's slice of prorated signing bonus, plus the maximum earnable value of any incentives. The agreement writes the example out itself, using round numbers for exactly the reason this article would have to: a player drafted in the second round signs four years with a $400,000 signing bonus and a $500,000 paragraph 5 salary and no incentives, the bonus prorates at $100,000 a year, so his Year-One Rookie Salary is $600,000, and his maximum annual increase is $150,000.
That is the agreement's own illustration, and it repays a second look. The signing bonus does two contradictory things at once. It raises the first year, which raises the base, which raises the permitted annual increase. It also consumes cap room in every year of the deal. So a club that wants a steeper contract has to pay a bigger bonus to earn the right to the steps, and the bonus it pays to buy the steps is charged against the same pool the steps are counted in.
- Paragraph 5 salary, year one500k
- Prorated signing bonus, year one100k
- Maximum annual increase thereafter150k
The figures are the illustration written into Article 7 of the agreement, used there to demonstrate the 25 per cent limit. The signing bonus is $400,000 prorated over four years, giving $100,000 a year.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Paragraph 5 salary, year one | 500k |
| Prorated signing bonus, year one | 100k |
| Maximum annual increase thereafter | 150k |
There is one exemption, and it is the reason so many late-round contracts look identical. The 25 per cent limit does not apply to a contract that provides only for paragraph 5 salary equal to the minimum active or inactive salary in every year of the deal. A pure minimum contract escalates with the minimum salary schedule rather than with a negotiated step. For a seventh-round pick, that is usually the whole deal plus a small signing bonus, which is why those contracts get signed in batches within days of the draft and generate no news at all.
Four years of proration, not five, and no option bonuses
Anyone who has read about veteran contract structuring arrives at rookie deals expecting the same toolkit and finds an empty box.
A rookie signing bonus prorates over the term of the contract, on a straight-line basis, with a maximum proration of four years. Not the five that a veteran contract is allowed. The fifth year, for a first-round pick, is explicitly excluded from the proration, so the option year cannot be used as a fifth bucket to spread the original bonus into.
That single difference removes most of the creativity. On a veteran deal the five-year ceiling is the thing clubs build around, stretching bonuses as far as the rule allows and attaching paper years when it runs out. On a rookie deal there is no stretching to do, because four years of contract and four years of proration are the same number.
The prohibitions go further, and the list is worth reading as a set of closed doors rather than a set of rules.
Option bonuses are banned. So are option exercise fees and option non-exercise fees. A veteran contract can carry a payment triggered by the club picking up a year, which then prorates across the remaining seasons. A rookie contract cannot contain one at all.
Voidable years are banned. So are buybacks of voidable years. The single most flexible instrument in professional football cap management does not exist here.
Salary advances are banned, other than advances of non-guaranteed first-year paragraph 5 salary, which is a narrow carve-out for cash flow rather than a lever.
A "contract within the contract" is banned, which is the catch-all: no side arrangement, no separate document, no dependent agreement that changes the economics of the contract that was filed.
There is a second tier of restrictions that reads like a list of things somebody once tried. No provision that automatically converts salary into bonus. No incentive contingent on a roster decision. No exclusive service clause. No anti-tampering provision written into a rookie deal. No making the formation of the contract conditional on a physical, although a signing bonus may be made conditional on passing one and reporting.
Every item on both lists closes a route back to the world the scale was built to end. The scale caps the money; the prohibitions stop the money being smuggled in as something with a different name.
- The league sets the two poolsA Year-One Rookie Compensation Pool covering first-year salary, and a Total Rookie Compensation Pool covering the full four years, sized at 5.5 times the first.
- Each club gets its allocationA proportional share of both pools, calculated from the number, round and position of that club's selections. Trade a pick and the allocation moves with it.
- Each pick gets an allotmentA Year-One Formula Allotment, a percentage of the pool derived from round and position, subject to a minimum allotment floor so late picks cannot be squeezed to nothing.
- The length is imposed, not agreedFour years for a drafted player, three for an undrafted one, with a club option for a fifth year on first-round picks only. The agreement calls the length fixed and unalterable.
- The 25 per cent limit shapes the yearsAnnual rises are capped at a quarter of Year-One Rookie Salary, which includes the first slice of prorated bonus. The contract can only climb in a straight line.
- Club and agent negotiate what is leftThe split between signing bonus and salary, the payment schedule, and how far the guarantees run. On most picks outside the first round there is almost nothing to discuss.
- The contract is filed and checkedA deal that would push a club past its Year-One or Total Rookie Allocation is disapproved by the Commissioner, and that disapproval stands unless clear and convincing evidence shows it was wrong.
The sequence runs the same way for the first pick and the last. The only stage with genuine negotiation in it is the second from the end, and the room there is narrow.
The guarantee ladder, and why year four is the year that matters
The most consequential negotiation on a rookie contract is not about money at all. It is about which years are guaranteed, and the agreement constrains that too, with a rule almost nobody outside a front office can quote.
Rookie salary may be guaranteed for skill, for football-related injury, and for salary cap termination. But no player's rookie salary in his third or fourth league year may be guaranteed for one of those reasons unless his entire rookie salary in the immediately preceding year has been guaranteed for the same reason.
Guarantees have to run consecutively from the start of the deal. A club cannot guarantee year four while leaving year three open, and it cannot guarantee skill in year three while leaving year two guaranteed for injury only. The ladder has no missing rungs.
The practical effect is that "fully guaranteed" for a top pick is not a flourish, it is the only legal way to guarantee the fourth year. Once a club agrees to guarantee year four for skill, the agreement forces it to have guaranteed years one, two and three for skill as well. That is why the guarantee argument on a high first-round pick is binary and why it resolves quickly, and it is why the same argument on a pick in the twenties is about whether the third year gets skill protection rather than about the fourth.
For everything the phrase covers beyond rookie deals, and the difference between money that is guaranteed and money that is merely scheduled, the distinction between guaranteed and non-guaranteed money is the load-bearing idea in professional football contracts, and it behaves differently here than anywhere else in the sport.
Nobody can renegotiate until after the third season
A drafted rookie's contract may not be renegotiated, amended or altered in any way until after the final regular season game of his third contract year. For an undrafted rookie, the wall comes down a year earlier, after the second.
This is why extension news arrives in the same window every year, and why a player who is plainly worth far more than he is being paid stays underpaid for a fixed and knowable period. There is no mechanism for early reward. A club that wanted to pay a second-year star more could not do it if it tried.
The rule does two things at once, and they pull in different directions.
For the club it removes an entire category of pressure. A player having an outstanding second season cannot ask for a new deal, and a club cannot be criticised for refusing one, because the agreement forbids the conversation. The old world of a productive young player agitating through a summer is closed by the calendar rather than by a stance.
For the player it removes his only leverage at exactly the point his value is rising fastest. He carries the injury risk of two more seasons on a price fixed before anyone knew what he was. If he gets hurt in year three, the market never sees the player who existed in year two.
For a first-round pick there is a further twist. The wall comes down after his third season and the fifth-year option decision falls in the same offseason. So the first moment a club is allowed to extend him is also the moment it has to decide whether to commit to a guaranteed fifth year. Those two conversations happen in the same room, which is why so many extensions for first-round picks are signed in the weeks either side of the option deadline.
The fifth-year option is priced by what he did, not by where he went
The option is the part of the scale that got rebuilt in the 2020 agreement, and the rebuild changed club behaviour more than anything else in Article 7.
The mechanics first. A club may exercise the option on a first-round pick by giving him written notice after the final regular season game of his third season and before 3 May of the following league year. Notice can be delivered by hand, by overnight mail, or as a PDF by email, which is a nice reminder that the largest decisions in the sport are still made by paperwork with a deadline on it.
Exercise it and the entire option year salary becomes guaranteed for skill, injury and cap termination immediately. Any part of the fourth year that was not guaranteed becomes guaranteed at the same moment. The option salary is not counted as rookie salary and does not come out of the rookie pools, so it sits on the club's cap as an ordinary charge.
The price is where the design shows. It is set by four tiers, and the tiers are built from the tender scales rather than from the draft.
A player selected to two or more Pro Bowls on the original ballot in his first three seasons prices at the franchise tender for his position. One Pro Bowl selection prices at the transition tender. A player with no Pro Bowl selection but with real playing time prices at a transition-style figure computed from the third through twentieth highest salaries at his position. Everyone else prices at a figure computed from the third through twenty-fifth highest salaries, which is a wider and therefore cheaper band.
The playing time test has three routes to the same tier: 75 per cent of the club's plays in two of the first three seasons, or a 75 per cent cumulative average across all three, or 50 per cent in each of the three. A player who was hurt for a year can still qualify through the third route. A player who started for two seasons and then lost his place can still qualify through the first.
The position used for the calculation is the one at which the player took the most plays in his third league year. Not where he was drafted, not what the depth chart calls him. A player who moved from one position group to another mid-career is priced at the group he actually played in, which occasionally moves the number a long way.
The design solves a problem the old system created. Pricing the option by draft slot meant two players with identical careers owed different amounts because of where they were taken three years earlier, which is precisely the information the intervening seasons had made irrelevant. Pricing it by playing time and selection makes the option self-sorting. A pick who plays constantly becomes expensive to keep, which forces his club to decide early. A pick who has been ordinary stays cheap, which lets his club keep him without thinking hard.
The cost of that elegance is the Pro Bowl criterion, which is a popularity vote used as a contract term. A player short of the playing time thresholds who makes the original ballot jumps two tiers on the strength of a ballot he did not control. It works often enough to be defensible and badly enough to be arguable, which is roughly the standard for everything in this agreement.
The Proven Performance Escalator, the scale's apology to the middle rounds
First-round picks get an option year. Undrafted players get a shorter deal and an earlier route to free agency. The players caught in between, drafted in rounds two through seven, get neither, and the escalator is what the agreement gives them instead.
It is compulsory. Every contract for a player drafted in rounds two through seven must contain it, and it may not be negotiated away. First-round picks are excluded because they have the option. Undrafted players are excluded entirely.
The escalator raises the fourth-year salary, and it has three levels.
Level one is the playing time route, and the threshold depends on the round. A second-round pick needs 60 per cent of his club's plays, either in any two of his first three seasons or as a cumulative average. A pick from rounds three to seven needs 35 per cent on the same tests. Clearing it raises the fourth year to the restricted free agent qualifying offer tier associated with his original round.
Level two is a consistency route: 55 per cent or more of the plays in all three seasons. Clearing that raises the fourth year to the same qualifying offer figure plus a further $250,000.
Level three is a Pro Bowl selection, which lifts the fourth year onto the tender scale rather than the qualifying offer scale, a significantly larger jump than either playing time level.
Two details do most of the work in practice. The escalator amount is not rookie salary and does not count against the rookie pools, so a club cannot be squeezed out of it by its allocation. And no portion of the escalator may be guaranteed for skill, football-related injury or cap termination. A player who earns the escalator has earned a raise he can still be released before receiving, which is a fairly complete summary of how contracts work in this sport.
The threshold structure produces the one genuinely uncomfortable incentive in Article 7. A player sitting just under a playing time threshold late in a season is worth measurably more to keep cheap than to play. There is no evidence anyone manages a snap count for the purpose, and the thresholds are set at levels that a genuine starter clears comfortably, which is presumably the point of setting them where they are. But the cliff is real, and it exists because a threshold is easier to administer than a sliding scale.
Incentives are permitted, and made almost pointless
Rookie contracts may contain performance incentives, and the agreement restricts them at both ends.
The permitted thresholds are set by round. For a pick from the first two rounds, an incentive may be keyed to 35 per cent of plays in the first year, or 45 per cent in later years. For rounds three to seven and for undrafted players, the equivalent figures are 15 per cent and 30 per cent.
Then the accounting kills the point of them. Every incentive counts at its maximum earnable amount, against the rookie pools and against the 25 per cent escalation limit, whether or not it is ever earned. On a veteran deal, an incentive classified as unlikely to be earned costs nothing against the current cap and is a genuine tool. On a rookie deal it costs full price on the day it is written.
Incentives also cannot be conditioned on the achievement or failure of other incentives, which closes the door on stacked or branching structures.
What is left is an instrument with no accounting advantage and a real cost in pool room. Rookie contracts contain few incentives for the same reason nobody writes cheques with a fee attached: there is nothing on the other side of the trade.
Undrafted rookies are inside the system and mostly invisible to it
An undrafted rookie signs for three years rather than four, and his rookie salary is counted differently. For a drafted player, rookie salary is the highest earnable compensation in each year of the deal. For an undrafted player, it is only the amount that exceeds the minimum active or inactive salary.
Read that twice. An undrafted rookie signed at the minimum contributes nothing at all to the rookie pool, because the pool measures only what he is paid above the floor. That is why every club can sign a large group of undrafted players within hours of the seventh round without the allocation arithmetic getting anywhere near a limit.
The one thing that is capped is the bonus money. The agreement sets an Undrafted Rookie Reservation, a maximum total that a single club may pay to undrafted rookies as signing bonus. It is a club-level pool rather than a per-player limit, which is what makes undrafted recruiting a genuine allocation decision: a club that wants to win a bidding contest for one player has less to offer the next twelve.
That constraint, rather than salary, is why undrafted recruiting is fought on playing time and scheme fit. The money available to differentiate one offer from another is small and shared, so clubs compete with the depth chart instead, and the players nobody selected end up choosing on the one variable that is genuinely theirs to weigh.
What happens when a club signs a contract it cannot afford
The enforcement mechanism is not a fine. It is disapproval.
No club may enter into rookie contracts that would exceed its Year-One Rookie Allocation, and none may exceed its Total Rookie Allocation. A contract that breaches either is disapproved by the Commissioner. If the club or the player challenges the disapproval, it is upheld by the System Arbitrator and the Appeals Panel unless clear and convincing evidence shows the decision to disapprove was incorrect.
That standard is deliberately hard to meet, and it explains why the rookie pool never features in the annual compliance drama the way the salary cap does. A club cannot go over its rookie allocation and sort it out later, because the contract that would take it over never becomes a contract. There is nothing to sort out.
The system also has a self-correcting quality when picks change hands. Allocations are calculated from the number, round and position of a club's selections, so trading a pick moves the allocation with it. A club that trades into the top ten acquires the obligation along with the choice, and one that trades out sheds both. Nobody has to file anything to make that work.
Why the players' side agreed to a scale at all
A wage scale is a restriction on what a group of players may earn, agreed by a union. It is worth being precise about why, because the usual explanation stops one level too early.
The pre-2011 system did not cost the owners money. It moved money. Rookie salary and veteran salary come out of the same negotiated share of revenue, so every dollar paid to a player who had never taken a professional snap was a dollar not available to the players who had. The people voting on the agreement were, without exception, the second group.
The scale converted that transfer into a set of things veterans wanted: higher minimum salaries, better benefits, and a smaller share of the pot committed to players who did not yet have a vote. Rookies pay for it. Rookies always pay for it, in every league that has tried this, because a bargaining unit that does not yet contain the affected members will price their labour cheaply and then defend the result.
The other thing the scale bought was the end of the holdout. Under the old system, a top pick who did not sign missed camp, and the leverage on both sides was genuine. Under the scale there is nothing to hold out about. The pool exists, the allotment exists, the length is imposed, the escalation limit is imposed, and the residual negotiation covers a signing bonus payment schedule. A rookie who refuses to sign is refusing to accept arithmetic.
What the scale did to the value of a draft pick
The consequence that reaches furthest is not about rookies. It is about what a pick is.
A draft selection under this system is a fixed-price call option on a player, with a term of four years, a strike price set before anybody knows the outcome, and a fifth year attached if the pick is in the first round. That is a financial instrument, and it behaves like one. It can be valued, traded, hedged and hoarded, which is why front offices treat picks as currency and why the charts used to price one pick against another matter more now than they did when the top of the first round carried a negotiated liability.
It also changed which picks are worth the most. A cheap and fixed price at the top of the draft means the surplus in the highest slots is large whenever the pick works, and the cost when it fails is bounded by four years of a scaled salary. That is a very different risk profile from the one that existed when a top pick's contract could distort a club's cap on its own.
The other side of the ledger deserves stating plainly. The scale is why a club that finds a quarterback in the first round gets a window rather than a player. For four years, five if it exercises the option, it is paying scaled money for the most expensive position in the sport, and it can afford to pay market rate everywhere else at the same time. Every aggressive decision a front office makes during that window, every restructured contract that pushes a charge into a future year, every dollar of room banked in one season to be spent in the next, is an attempt to convert a fixed-term discount into a trophy before the discount expires.
What the wage scale costs, and who pays it
Any system this tidy is redistributing something, and it is worth naming who is out of pocket.
The player it hurts most is the one who is genuinely excellent immediately. A rookie who is among the best players in the league in his first season earns a scaled salary, is forbidden from renegotiating until after his third season, and can then be held for a fourth and a fifth at prices set by tiers. The gap between his production and his pay is the largest single mispricing in professional football, and it is created deliberately.
The second group is the middle rounds. A fourth-round pick who becomes a starter has one raise mechanism, the escalator, which is not guaranteed and which he must clear a playing time threshold to earn. His route to a market-rate contract runs through four full seasons.
The third group is anyone who gets hurt. Because the contract cannot be touched until after the third season, a player who loses a year to injury loses the leverage that year would have generated, permanently. There is no adjustment for it and no mechanism to claw it back.
Set against that, the scale gives every drafted player something the old system did not: a signed contract within days of the draft, at a price nobody can argue him down from, with a fixed and public route to the next one. Certainty is worth something, and for the great majority of drafted players, who will never sign a second contract of any size, certainty is what they get instead of a negotiation they would have lost.
Reading a rookie contract properly
Four things tell you nearly everything about a rookie deal, and none of them is the headline total.
How much of it is signing bonus. The bonus is the only money paid up front and the only money the player keeps regardless. On a late-round contract it is often the entire real negotiation, and it is the number that survives a release in August.
How far the guarantees run. Because guarantees must ladder consecutively from year one, the year that is guaranteed last tells you exactly how far the club committed. If the fourth year is guaranteed, all four are. If only the first two are, the club held the line at the third.
The escalator level his round carries. For a pick from rounds two to seven, the playing time threshold is the difference between his fourth year being a scaled salary and a tender-linked one, and the threshold is knowable from the round he was taken in.
The date the option decision falls. For a first-round pick, the third season ends and the club has until early May to commit to a guaranteed fifth year. That date is the single most informative moment in the first four years of his career, because the answer is a club stating, in writing and in money, what it thinks he is.
None of those four is hidden. All of them are set by an agreement anyone can read. The reporting will keep describing rookie contracts as though they were negotiated, and every so often a figure will be quoted as if somebody won something, but the interesting question about a rookie deal was never how big it is. It is what the club was willing to guarantee, and how early it was willing to say so.
More on how the money and the rules fit together, across this sport and others, sits in the American football archive.
Common questions
How does the NFL rookie wage scale work?
The agreement fixes a league-wide pool of rookie money each year and divides it among the clubs in proportion to the number, round and position of their draft picks. Each pick carries an allotment calculated from a formula, so the size of a rookie contract is set by where a player is taken rather than by anything his agent says. What is left to negotiate is mostly the timing of payments and a narrow band of guarantee language.
Why are NFL rookie contracts four years long?
Because the agreement says so and forbids anything else. A drafted rookie signs for exactly four years whatever round he is taken in, an undrafted rookie signs for three, and a first-round pick's deal carries a club option for a fifth season. The length is described in the agreement as fixed and unalterable, which removes the whole category of argument that used to run into training camp.
What is the 25 per cent rule in NFL rookie contracts?
It caps how much a rookie's salary may rise from one year of his deal to the next at 25 per cent of his first-year figure. The base is not his salary alone but his Year-One Rookie Salary, which is his first-year pay plus the first slice of prorated signing bonus. The effect is that every rookie deal climbs in a straight line rather than being back-loaded, so the fourth year cannot be inflated to hide money.
Is the NFL fifth-year option guaranteed?
Yes. Under the 2020 agreement the whole of the option year salary becomes guaranteed for skill, injury and salary cap termination the moment the club exercises it, and any part of the fourth year that was not already guaranteed becomes guaranteed at the same time. That is why clubs treat the decision as a real commitment rather than a formality, and occasionally decline it on players they intend to keep.
What is the Proven Performance Escalator?
It is a compulsory raise mechanism written into every contract for players drafted in rounds two through seven, which lifts the fourth-year salary for a player who has played enough or been selected for the Pro Bowl. It exists because a mid-round pick who becomes a starter has no other route to a raise before his deal expires. First-round picks are excluded, because they have the option year instead, and undrafted players are excluded altogether.
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