4 moves the Chargers can make to free up $62 million in cap space

Extend Keenan Allen to free up $12.25 million

This number is not actually set in stone and the Chargers can decide just how much they want to free up by signing Keenan Allen to an extension. The Chargers can covert some of his base salary from this season into a bonus that can get paid out over the length of the extension.

In this instance, we chose $12.25 million because it is a realistic number that the Chargers could put off toward future years while also giving us the nice round number of $62 million in newfound space.

Allen has a $34.7 million cap hit this season, $18.1 million of which is via his base salary. Instead of cutting ties with Allen, the team should sign him to a two-year contract extension worth $24 million. That might not seem like much, but that is around the same contract DeAndre Hopkins got and he is younger than Allen.

The Chargers would be converting $12.25 million of Allen's salary into bonuses over those two years. If the team wanted it to be the same each year it would be $6.125 million, making Allen's cap hit in each of the two extension years $18.125 million. With how fast the cap is growing, that is a great price. Of course, the team could also get creative and backload it so the second year is a bigger hit, or frontload it. The only contingency that Allen would likely ask for is that it would be all guaranteed.

After all of this the Chargers would have $25.1 million in cap space. The Chargers' projected draft pool is just over $13 million, giving the Chargers around $12 million to spend on free agents and an in-season budget.

That might not be enough to make a huge move, but it is enough to re-sign a key free agent (like Alohi Gilman) and bring in 2-3 more cheap, depth free agents. And if the team really needs more, it can convert more of Allen's base salary into future money.