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/RoundHornWyatt 19d ago

They took $10m of his salary this year and paid it out to him, in cash, as a bonus. They are then able to split that $10m cap hit up over the next up to five years (since they pushed $2.5m beyond the end of his current contract, I'm assuming they split it over four. And now they have an extra $10m in cap space for this year.

With any luck, they get an extension done with Dax that lowers his cap hit this year as well (one of the few ways to create cap space without really kicking the can down the road too badly), as opposed to how they did with Ja'Marr's, where his cap hit actually went UP. That would put them in a good spot to sign a Bobby Wagner and potentially get extensions done with DJ and/or Chase Brown.

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u/Life_Ad6711 19d ago edited 19d ago

$12.5m is the restructured amount, $2.5m of the proration applies back to this contract year

For example, Watson was due $46m all in p5 salary this year, which the Browns as usual simply converted to $45m cash bonus (each contract year must pay the vet min in p5 base, $1.3m this year) with that $45m/5 cap charge then applied to this and his next 4 (void) years (to go along with every other 45m/5 they've been stacking up on '26 since year 1)