The hard cap

Every clause, in words

¶1The press release says $150M; the paper sums to $149.56M — headline numbers are rounded up, and they are the least reliable line in the deal.

The signed base value is every dollar with a schedule attached: $89M of Paragraph 5 salary, the $48M signing bonus, the $8M roster bonus, $1.5M of workout money and $3.06M of per-game actives. The $3M of incentives is excluded from the headline entirely — likely and unlikely alike, it appears in the schedules, never in the announcement. Divide by four and you get the other press number, a $37.39M “average per year”.

¶2Cash now, cap later: the $48M is wired this month but charged to the cap as $12M a year for four years — the deal’s entire shape flows from this line.

Proration is capped at five league years (Art. 13 §6(b)(i), unchanged since the 2011 CBA); on a four-year term it spreads $12M a year, 2026–2029. The gap it opens — money paid but not yet charged — is the seed of every later mechanism in the guide: it is what a restructure widens and what acceleration bills when the player leaves early.

¶3Base salary starts at $2M against the $48M bonus and climbs to $37M — the back-loaded staircase every cash-up-front deal builds, and the raw material of every later restructure.

Paragraph 5 is the one component where cap and cash agree: each year’s salary counts against that year’s cap and arrives in eighteen game checks. The $2M first year is the classic bonus-heavy shape — he banks $50M in 2026 while the cap sees $14M — and the $30M and $37M late years are exactly the money a club later converts, trades away or declines to pay.

¶4A guaranteed $8M for standing on the Week 1 roster of Year 2 — and because it is earned in the regular season, it counts as a flat $8M on the 2027 cap, no proration.

The drafting here is deliberate. A roster bonus payable in the offseason and fully guaranteed at signing is treated as signing bonus and prorated (Art. 13 §6(b)(iii)(11)) — the CBA closes that disguise. Moving the earn date to the first regular-season game keeps the flat-in-its-year treatment honest: guaranteed money, but a 2027 charge in 2027. Real deals sit on both sides of this line, and misreading it is the most common amateur cap-sheet error.

¶5Availability money: $60K a game, seventeen games, $1.02M a season in Years 2–4 — paid only for the weeks he actually suits up.

The cap books these by last season’s attendance: a player active for all seventeen games carries the full $1.02M as likely-to-be-earned, while games he missed drop out of the baseline and count only if achieved (Art. 13 §6(c)(xxi) and its worked example). The engine simplifies to the full-season figure; the true-up for missed games arrives as a credit on next year’s cap.

¶6Half a million each spring for showing up in April — counted against the cap automatically, because attendance is entirely in his control.

Anything within the player’s sole control — reporting, workouts, weight — is automatically likely-to-be-earned (Art. 13 §6(c)), so all three $500K years sit on the cap from day one. Had the club guaranteed the workout money it would convert to signing-bonus treatment under §6(b)(iii); unguaranteed, it stays a flat charge in its own year.

¶7Two bonuses, two cap fates: he caught 90 balls last season but fell short of 1,200 yards, so the $1M counts against this year’s cap now and the $2M counts nowhere.

The likely-to-be-earned test is purely backward-looking: met the threshold last season and the incentive is on this season’s cap; missed it and the books ignore it (Art. 13 §6(c)(i)). The year-end reconciliation squares reality with the guess — an earned NLTBE bonus is charged to next year’s cap, an unearned LTBE one comes back as next-year credit. Cash, either way, is paid only if the season delivers.

¶8This paragraph plus the signing bonus is the “$78M fully guaranteed” of the press release; the Year 3 $30M is protected against injury now and against everything only from March 2027.

Guarantees come in three prongs — skill, injury, cap — and “fully guaranteed” means all three. The vesting date is the club’s engineered exit: release him healthy before the third league day of Year 2 and the $30M is never owed, one day later and it is locked. That single calendar line is why veteran cuts cluster in the first seventy-two hours of every league year.

¶9If he is cut and signs elsewhere, the new team’s checks come off what this club still owes on its guarantees — the standard clause that stops double collection.

With offset language the old club pays only the shortfall between its guarantee and his next salary; without it he collects both in full — the concession Kirk Cousins famously extracted in 2018. Offsets change the cash owed, and the cap charge trues up behind the cash; the engine’s applyOffset is this clause as arithmetic.

¶10The bonus is paid but not unconditional: a holdout, a retirement or a suspension lets the club claw back that year’s slice of the $48M.

Forfeited allocations come back to the club as a cap credit the following league year (Art. 13 §6(b)(iv)) — the rare mechanism that runs in the club’s favor. It is also why suspension-exposed contracts minimize Paragraph 5: Deshaun Watson’s 2022 salary was written at $1.035M against a $44.965M bonus precisely so that docked game checks cost him almost nothing. The engine leaves forfeiture unmodeled; this clause is where it would attach.

¶11Boilerplate with teeth: full pay even from injured reserve, and a once-per-career right to collect the season’s remaining salary if he is cut mid-year.

A split contract pays a lower “down” rate for weeks off the active roster (Art. 26 §1(b)) — fringe-roster deals carry them, $150M deals never do, and the absence is itself a negotiated term. Termination pay makes an in-season cut of a vested veteran cost most of the year’s salary anyway, which is why the brutal roster math happens in March, not October. The engine models neither; both live in this paragraph.

¶12The 30% rule: dormant fine print in 2026, but the binding constraint on any contract that reaches past the CBA’s 2030 expiry.

No contract extending beyond the Final League Year may raise its non-bonus salary by more than 30% of the final-league-year salary per season (Art. 13 §7(a)) — a fixed step off one base, not compounding. This deal ends in 2029, safely inside; but a 2027 or 2028 mega-extension will be drafted against it, the way 2010–11 deals were, and the flat-looking salary schedules of late-CBA contracts are its fingerprint.

¶13Cash timing is negotiable; cap timing is not — deferring the bonus checks moves money across calendar years without moving a dollar of cap charge.

Deferred Paragraph 5 counts against the cap in the year it is earned, at present value (Art. 13 §6(a)(ii)), and deferred bonus keeps its original proration — the NFL severs the Ohtani lever at the root. The funding rule then removes the cash motive too: Art. 26 §9 makes the club escrow the present value of deferred and guaranteed compensation, so the money leaves the owner’s hands either way. See DEFERRAL_VIEW for the worked comparison.

¶14A clean four-year term — none of the proration machinery (option bonuses, void years) that other deals bolt on is here yet, which is exactly what the restructure simulator installs.

Void years are contract years that exist only as proration runway: they carry bonus allocations while the player is never under contract to play them, and when the contract voids, everything parked there accelerates onto that year’s cap at once (Art. 13 §6(b)(ii)(4)). This deal signs without any. Run the dead-money section’s simulator and watch the clause quietly disappear — one max restructure at a time.