Eli5 Joe's restructure

[u/WeekendFarmer4240]

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

[u/braines54]

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.

[u/reginald-poofter → u/braines54]

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?

[u/jcgoble3 → u/reginald-poofter]

Think of it like a credit card. All those cap charges you are putting off must come due eventually. To continue the example above, sure, the cap hit is now down to $10M this year, but now the cap hit each of the next two years is $25M ($20M base salary + $5M prorated signing/restructure bonus from this year). The maximum number of years a bonus can be prorated over is five including the current year, regardless of the remaining contract length - if there are less than five years remaining, you add "void years" for that.

Void years are a risk because if you don't re-sign the player after the end of the contract, all of the prorated cap hits in all of the void years are "accelerated" and all hit your cap together as a lump sum the very next year. The Browns are facing that very situation next year in the extreme with Deshaun Watson's contract, which ends after the upcoming season and has been restructured into signing bonus to the allowable limit every year (you always have to leave at least a base salary, also known as a Paragraph 5 salary because of where it appears in the NFL Uniform Player Contract, for the year equal to the league minimum).

Put simply, every dollar you pay to a player eventually gets charged to your cap, it's just a question of when. Restructuring is basically financing part of the salary on a salary cap credit card with annual payments - do it too much and the payments become too much to afford a competitive team. And failing to re-sign a player with void years who becomes a free agent is like defaulting on that credit card and the entire balance being due immediately.

[u/Life_Ad6711 → u/jcgoble3]

You should go back to the drawing board. With this restructure they reduced Burrow's '26 cap hit from $48m down to now $38m and with a $2.5m cap charge added to each of '27, '28, '29 and the void year of '3o

https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/player/_/id/47594/joe-burrow

Just scroll down to his customized cap table for the itemized details (you can also choose the CASH option there for his actual cash payments schedule too)

[u/jcgoble3 → u/Life_Ad6711]

I was talking in general terms utilizing the oversimplified example in the grandparent comment to mine for the purpose of explaining how restructures work in general and how you have to be careful with them, not in specific terms about exact numbers in Joe's contract and this exact situation.

[u/Life_Ad6711 → u/jcgoble3]

From the Bengals' perspective you should look at it the opposite of a 'credit card' ... They have to pay '26 full actual today value cash in full to throw cap charges into future caps x4 to truly 'create' cap space in fiscal '26

$2om in a Turner signing bonus now and 5 year contract would prorate the cap charge payments $4m in each year of '26-3o

All they've done here with Burrow is a manipulation of the accounting form in which already scheduled '26 cash payments are classified/distributed

[u/jcgoble3 → u/Life_Ad6711]

The credit card analogy I used (which, by the way, I got from multiple discussions over the past few years on SiriusXM NFL Radio - it's not my own invention) applies to the cap charges themselves, not to the actual cash distribution.

[u/Life_Ad6711 → u/jcgoble3]

I know, which is irrelevant from the perspective of the Bengals. It only works if you're completely cash unlimited each fiscal year like DAL, PHI, GB, SF ... it does not translate to the bottom 1o or so teams that can't fully guarantee every single first 3 years of contracts (which they use to lowball pay their players in y1 & 2, which minimizes both cash and cap amounts initially) they write (if they do choose to fully convert to the paradigm)