SmashMouth

With Drew Brees finally retired, the Saints can get to work on their post-Brees quarterback plan.

Step one: Sign Taysom Hill to a new contract that isn’t really a new contract.

The carefully crafted initial tweet from Adam Schefter of ESPN says that the “[d]etails are great,” and that it’s a four-year $140 million extension. Although Schefter can perhaps find some plausible deniability in the precise meaning of “great,” it’s all fake and it’s all phony. The restructuring is a device for creating 2021 cap space, and nothing more.

The four-year extension, which pays out $35 million per year, is fully voidable. Schefter eventually mentions that, but there will be a percentage of media and fans who fail to fully understand what’s happening; based on his initial tweet, some will think the Saints are paying Hill $35 million per year when they most definitely aren’t.

Per a source with knowledge of the situation, Hill simply gets the $12.159 million he was supposed to earn this year. The addition of the four phony years, regardless of fake salaries, allows for the creation of $7.75 million in cap space.

As the source explained it when asked point blank what Hill gets, Hill gets what he was due to get in fully-guaranteed fashion. Indirectly, he gets the benefit of extra cap dollars for a team desperate both to comply with the cap and to have enough space to maneuver.

He will never get $140 million over four years under this deal. Presumably, the Saints could have picked any number they wanted. The number chosen, coupled with the carefully reckless way the numbers initially were presented, will result in some mistakenly thinking that Hill is getting paid obscenely more than he is.

jeanpierre

neugey

So a little bit like Tom Brady's contract restructure then. Effectively a two-year deal masquerading as 4-5 year deal.

Restructures are king in today's NFL, that's for sure.

SaintGnome

Actual picture of Mickey working the CAP.

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RaginCajun83

In Loomis I Trust

st thomas

Most of our players now and in the past should be thankful of the generosity of the New Orleans saints org. They will be getting checks in the mail way pass there time in the NFL from spread out cash like a added pension


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AsylumGuido

Nope. That cash has already been paid to the player and is just being accounted for in later periods. Every time you see cap pushed out into future periods a check for the full amount is almost always given at the time the contract, extension, or restructure, is signed. The rare occasion it doesn't is when both sides agree to the total being paid at a later date within the first year. Extremely rare.

gosaints1

$19M+ in dead money would like to have a conversation with you. I’m just not a fan of paying ppl not to do work for me, but to each their own. >10% of our cap allocation is on players not on our roster.

AsylumGuido

Exactly! Dead money is the accounting for cash paid out previously in the form of signing bonuses. It isn't payment for people not doing work for you. It is the accounting for what you have already paid people for work already done.

If you were to hire a contractor to do an addition on your house for $50,000 and had to pay him cash at the time of completion you could take out a loan. Let's say it's a five year loan and you pay back $10,000 each year. All the work was completed in year one. It's much the same as dead money. Nobody is doing the work in years two through five but you are still having to account for the money that the contractor has already received.

Dead cap is not wasted cap unless it is guarantees (other than original signing bonus or converted roster bonus) attached to a player released from an initial contract. There are not many of those as it would be basically guaranteed salary which is extremely rare in NFL contracts. In that case all the work wasn't done. But in the case of restructured or extended contracts it usually does apply to work done with accounting pushed out into the future.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Winston Churchill

SmashMouth

Cap management is a silly game based on how it's structured. It is what it is. I'm still glad we have it. It benefits smaller market teams bigly.