It's in fact expected to remain flat past 2015, the latest projections have the 2015 cap at 122 million as of the last owners meeting. The new deal and soaring revenue don't mean a whole lot to the cap with the current setup.
The reason behind that is the NFL didn't borrow for just last year, it did for up to 2015. Which is why the cap wasn't in the 110 million range like expected this current season, nor was it 115 or so last season. So in essence the league borrowed from itself from 2013-2016 or so and the cap is expected to remain flat because of that. The cap for 2016 isn't expected to go up a whole lot either.
http://espn.go.com/n...lary-cap-growthWhere did all the salary-cap money go?
The answer resides in what has happened during the first two seasons of the new collective bargaining agreement. When the management council and the NFL Players Association ran the numbers from the percentage of money going to the players, the salary cap in 2011 was supposed to be less than $120 million. It could have been as low as around $116 million.
To put more salary money into free agency last season, the union was able to shift some of the benefit money into salary money. The result was a $120.375 million cap in 2011.
According to sources, the salary cap was supposed to be around $113.5 million this year. With 427 free agents, a huge cap decrease would have depressed the market and given almost too much contract leverage to teams. The union worked out a deal with the owners to trade off $7.1 million in benefit dollars per team from future years to have a $120.6 million salary cap.
Basically the Cap was supposed to look like this for the deal.
2011 - 116
2012 - 113
2013 - 115
2014 - 118
2015 - 122
Instead it looked like this -
2011 - 120
2012 - 120-121
2013 - 120-121
2014 - 120-121
2015 - 122