AsylumGuido

Ramczyk would carry a $35,359,969 hit if he chooses to retire. His 2024 hit according to Spotrac is $12,860,321 as is. As a post June 1st his 2024 portion of the dead money would be $11,650,323 saving the team $1,209,998 this year. We'd still have a 2025 cap hit of $23,709,646 in dead money.

SmashMouth

If he retires, they'll rework his contract for cap relief, a la Brees when he retired.

AsylumGuido

Not sure what they can do now that the season is underway. Brees' deal was done prior to the league year.

lee909

Surely you just get him to sit on IR for the year and retire next year. Gives the team more time to redo the deal and split it over 2025 and 26

BakoSaint

I am learning a lot about how the cap works too. You are close but missing a more likely scenario I think. If Ram is inactive all year he will earn only 1.21m base salary with no incentives cashing in plus his 11.65m existing prorated money. Since he is under contract already for 2025, we don't need to rework his deal like we did with Thomas or Winston to allow him to still be under contract when a post-June-1 cut could be executed. So we could just pay Ram the 1.21 million salary + 11.65m prorated bonus in 24, designate him a post-june-1 cut in March 2025, and then 11.65m would hit the cap in 2025 and 15.86m in 2026, spreading out the dead cap hit.

If Ram retired against the teams wishes during the season, it could trigged a greater cap hit. But I believe Ram got some sort of bonus when he restructured his contract this March. If he retired against the teams will early in a way that would needlessly hurt their cap rather than waiting until March 2025, the Saints might be able to recover that bonus, arguing that he already had the same injury when he signed the deal, and that the deal was structured with the intent for him to try to play in 2024 and then if he could not, to give the team the option to move on in 2025.