[Chiefs Blog] Adam Teicher of the Kansas City Star does a nice job of explaining the Chiefs salary cap situation, and why you may have seen different accounts on the Chiefs available cap space.

Teicher explains that the NFL distributed to its teams last week a salary cap accounting that shows the Chiefs lead the league in available salary cap space. The document shows the Chiefs with just less than $63 million of available room.

But the report didn’t take into account escalators that greatly increase the individual cap numbers for certain players. For instance, Tyson Jackson achieved certain playing incentives that pushed his 2012 salary cap number from about $5 million to about $10.75 million. A handful of other Chiefs players also reached their incentives to trigger much higher salary cap numbers and, in all, this will chew up about $20 million of that available salary cap space.

So the Chiefs will have about $37 million of available salary cap space when the new NFL year begins on March 13, but that’s only if they don’t sign any of their potential free agents or place the franchise tag on either Dwayne Bowe or Brandon Carr by then.

Of course, the Chiefs will do those things so their number will be less than $37 million by the start of free agency.