Given that the rookie allocation pool is "flat" this year, with essentially the same cap room available for signing first-year players as in 2001, most agents for first-round picks can pretty much divine the kind of deal they are going to get for their clients even before the substantive negotiations begin.

	“	People are going to have to be very creative. There's not much room with which to work. ”
		— Hadley Engelhard, Ryan Sims' agent

But for agent Hadley Engelhard, who represents Kansas City Chiefs first-round selection and former North Carolina defensive tackle Ryan Sims, all guesswork is now eliminated.

Because the Chiefs quickly signed all four of their other draft choices -- second-round defensive tackle Eddie Freeman, fourth-round tailback Omar Easy, fifth-round linebacker Scott Fujita and seventh-round linebacker Maurice Rodriguez -- the 2002 cap number for Sims is already determined. So make Sims, in essence locked in to a rigid cap number, the first victim of the "flat" rookie pool for 2002.

But hardly the last.

Remember, the rookie pool is basically a cap within a cap, the maximum amount of cap room that can be expended for draft choices and undrafted free agents. While the pool is "flat" for 2002, and will be again in 2003, first-year minimum base salaries for rookies rose from $209,000 to $225,000. That increase of 7.6 percent makes it difficult to fit the rookies into a static allocation pool this year.

"People are going to have to be very creative," Engelhard said. "There's not much room with which to work."

In terms of cap value for 2002, there's actually no wiggle room now with which Engelhard can work. The first-year cap values for the Kansas City draft choices already signed to deals total $1,477,152: Freeman ($644,319), Easy ($331,000), Fujita ($265,000) and Rodriguez ($236,833). The Chiefs also invested $62,420 of cap space in undrafted free agents. So the total cap room already expended is $1,539,572.

That leaves only about $1.849 million of Kansas City's $3.389 million rookie allocation pool for Sims, the sixth prospect chosen overall, and a player for whom the Chiefs traded up two spots in the first round.

The number is significant because the sixth overall player selected in the 2001 draft, New England defensive tackle Richard Seymour, had a first-year cap value of $2 million. So no matter how creative Engelhard gets in negotiations, Sims' cap charge in '02 will still be about 7½ percent below the corresponding choice of a year ago.

Even though he is locked into a frozen cap number, no one should weep for Sims, who was elevated to the first-unit defense by coordinator Greg Robinson recently. Engelhard is an excellent negotiator, adept at juggling numbers, and long ago began the process of determining several options for assuring his client won't get sold short. In fact, he has already submitted at least one proposal to Kansas City negotiator Denny Thum, and the talks should heat up next week.

Engelhard has been outspoken about not wanting to wait until mid-July to parameters, and reasoning there is little gained by the kind of early inertia typical in most first-round deals. Even before he was locked into a cap number, Sims figured to be one of the early first-round agreements in the league, and that is now all but assured.

There's an old adage that an agent can make contract numbers do just about anything he wants them to do. But no matter what Engelhard and Sims do with the numbers for this season, they still can't make them come out to more than a cap value of $1.849 million, because Kansas City so quickly took care of business with its other rookies and because of the "flat" allocation.

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