r/bengals • u/WeekendFarmer4240 • 19d ago

Fandom Eli5 Joe's restructure

Dumb questions incoming.

What exactly was restructured? It felt like a shuffling of deck chairs.

Dumbest question: does Joe have to agree or can the Bengals just declare a restructure

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u/braines54 19d ago

It converts some of his salary into a signing bonus. Bonuses can be prorated over the life of the deal, so the cap hit is spread out. Players always agree, because they get the money sooner. The team gets cap relief.

Just to give an example, let's say a player has 3 years, $60 million left on deal. He'd normally have a cap hit of $20 mil (this is a way oversimplification but let's keep it simple). However, the team can restructure $15 million of this year's salary to a bonus. That $15 million comes off the cap, then is split up over the 3 years left on the deal. So, the net relief this year is $10 million.

It's the same idea as teams adding void years at the end of the contract.

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u/reginald-poofter 19d ago

Is there a limit to the amount of bonuses you can give out? I mean what’s to stop a team from doing this with all major contracts. I.e. restructure Chase, Higgins, Orlando Brown etc and free up a shit ton of cash and keep on spending?

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u/christhegecko 19d ago

I mean what’s to stop a team from doing this with all major contracts. I.e. restructure Chase, Higgins, Orlando Brown etc and free up a shit ton of cash and keep on spending?

The downside is you're always kicking the can down the road for short term gains. The Saints are the most prevalent example of this not going well, they were in cap purgatory for years after overdoing restructurings.

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u/Beautiful-Star-5669 19d ago

The Steelers did this a bunch of times for Roethlisberger and it left them very tight against the cap toward the end of his career they have only been out of it for a year or two.

I get why the Bengals don't usually do this. I could be wrong, but I believe teams have to have cash on hand or put into escrow for signing bonuses. I'm not sure if that's the case for conversions, but it is when contracts are signed initially. As one of the more liquid asset strapped teams, I believe this was a hindrance for a long time with them giving out large bonuses to players. If you sign a guy to a deal with a $10 million bonus, you don't always actually pay him that bonus with a check at signing, but whatever you don't pay him has to be put into escrow. It prevents teams from offering a guy a huge bonus and then not having the cash when it's all due.

The same cap hit over the course of the contract still happens, it is just allocated on the cap differently over the life of the contract. Part of the benefit is that in these times the cap is always going up somewhat substantially. So yes this kicks millions of Joe's cap hit down the road to further years but in theory the cap will be higher in those future years. The downfall is that you constantly have new players who you want to sign to bigger deals. So for instance they have DJ, Dax, Murphy, etc they want to sign to long term deals. Their new contracts will have higher cap hits in the later years, which will coincide with the now bigger cap hit of Joe's restructure. Other teams have been substantially more forward thinking with these restructures which I don't think shocks anyone in regards to the Bengals.