Arizona Cardinals have cap money to spend, but on what?

Mar 7, 2015, 4:18 PM | Updated: 4:30 pm

There are just a few days left before NFL free agency begins, and in the meantime teams are digging through couch cushions to get a final count of how much money they actually have to spend.

Okay, so maybe the amount the Arizona Cardinals have to work with isn’t just chump change — they’re sitting in a solid position with about $21 million to work with.

The NFL announced this week about a $10 million increase in the salary cap from last season, so each team has, at most, $143 million to spend on its entire 2015 roster.

The Cardinals carried over just over $4 million of cap space from last season and the team’s top 51 contracts are calculated at a combined total of $134.5 million. Friday, the team restructured quarterback Carson Palmer’s contract and freed up over $7 million more in room.

Therefore, Arizona has about $21 million to spend as free agency arrives — or not spend, if they so choose.

That’s plenty of money for a guy like Steve Keim to work with.

In fact, it’s sort of an unfathomable total to the average person whose idea of budgeting is not buying the second bag of barbecue chips at Circle K.

So what in the world could actually be purchased for $21 million, you know, if the Cardinals weren’t looking for offensive linemen, linebackers and running backs?

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At $14.99 apiece, you could buy a pair of consolation khakis for every San Francisco 49ers fan that follows the team's Twitter account -- and have 618,000 pairs left over to gift to that special sad 49ers fan in your life. We all know one. Because nothing says "Hey, thanks for getting rid of the best thing that's ever happened to you, and thanks for the NFC West for the next few years," like a horrible pair of khakis.

A bag of Skittles, on average, costs around $2.00. Therefore, Keim and Co. could potentially pay to remove 10.5 million bags of Skittles from the city of Seattle and surrounding areas...take that, Marshawn. It still hurts.

The Cardinals could pay for the health insurance that it would take to cover being bitten 333 times by a real, live honey badger...though you'd probably have to pay for funeral services first. I won't say how I know this, but you could also buy seven real honey badgers at black-market pricing.

With $21 million, the Cardinals could distribute 840,000 Wendy's Frostys at $5.00 apiece every time defensive end Frostee Rucker gets a sack -- if he matches last season's 5.0 sacks, that's 4.2 million Frostys, or at least one for each person in Phoenix.

The Cardinals could fund 700,000 hours (almost 80 years) of private dance lessons at $30.00 apiece for Cardinals receiver John Brown...but why would we want to change his, um, unique style anyway?

This one is going to get weird, but stay with me. Arizona could, assuming the technology is available, clone 10 Cardinals players and/or Bruce Arians. Forbes estimates the cost of human molecular cloning to be about $2 million, "including bribes" (what?).

At any rate, the 2030 Cardinals could be AWESOME. Ethically unsound, but awesome. Larry Fitzgerald, part two? Come on!

It's illegal to buy North American Cardinals as they are a protected species...but you could buy 7,000 of their cousins, the red crested cardinal from Brazil. Imagine...7,000 cardinals released before Cardinals games...what could go wrong?

The Cardinals could set $331.23 on each of the 63,400 seats in University of Phoenix Stadium. You'd be like Oprah. Only better, because sports are involved.

With $21 million, the Cardinals could buy 567,567 Kangol caps for Bruce Arians at $37.00 apiece. Bonus: Many seem to be on sale at the moment.

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