PENNY BY PENNY
Every NFL season, teams dole out millions of dollars in contract payment to their players. Many NFL teams will even make allowances for missing contract specifications for bonus when players are close to a specific achievement. Some team will pay players their roster bonuses when the players are not on the active roster. This season and offseason should see a change in the financial landscape for many teams. Even if you get your information from sites like www.spotrac.com or www.overthecap.com, you will see that half of all NFL teams will have less than 20 million dollar in cap space if the cap stays at 175 million. Nine of those teams are already in the negative column based on current contracts alone.
NO MORE MR NICE GUY
While it doesn’t seem like much every penny will count in next year’s contracts negotiations, extensions and player adjustments (releases and trades). Last season when Richard Sherman didn’t reach his incentive trigger, the 49ers paid the man as if he did. This year the team has been exposed to the injured reserve with more players being assigned than any other team in the NFL. That being said there are 16 roster players that have contracts with roster bonuses and while it’s not much, the team should recoup any money it can to roll over to next season. We are currently going into week 7 of the NFL schedule and the of those 16 players with roster bonus contract language, 10 players have already missed enough games for the team to add $1,678,125 worth of cap space. The anticipated return dates for those players could return an additional $675,000.
LET THE NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN
If you take a look at the numbers put together by Jason Hurley over at www.49erscap.com, you will start to understand how the team can create some cap relief and dispel some misconceptions on cuts or trades of certain personnel. It may be in the team’s best interest to start looking at extensions versus cut of players that have had contracts restructured. Only time will tell what John Lynch and Paraag Marathe plan to do, but they have been fairly creative in the past and I would expect more of the same from them in an effort to not impact the future of the empire.
