For teams such as the Ravens that are facing salary-cap pains, one solution being tossed about in the media is to push money from contracts —especially big, new ones — into 2015, when the NFL’s cap presumably will make a big jump because of money from new television contracts.

However, that big jump may actually be more like a little hop.

Pro Football Talk reports — via “a source with extensive knowledge of the design and implementation of the cap” — that, though the money allowed under the cap will rise, it will be more of a gradual process.

Mike Florio writes: “The formula will experience a ‘smoothing’ in the coming years, with no one year resulting in a dramatic leap.  The thinking is that, if the cap shoots up dramatically from one year to the next, it won’t be fair to the players who signed a big contract in the year in which the cap was lower.”

The cap increase also will be moderated because money from future cap years was shifted onto the 2012 season, when the cap would have gone down because of decreased revenue related to 2011’s lockout.

So it appears that the Ravens’ formula for signing Joe Flacco while trying to keep as many of his teammates as possible will be even more complicated a computation than we imagined.