There are few things in life that are guaranteed. Among them are death, taxes, and Howie Roseman restructuring contracts:

Roseman has been doing this for years now.

In Lane’s case, he signed a four year contract extension in November of 2019, so what happens is that a portion of the money is put in a can that gets kicked down the road, in order to free up cap space now. They add these dummy years to the back end of the contract so they take a lesser hit immediately and spread out the dead cap into the future.

This is how it’s explained at Over the Cap:

“The contract is worth $72 million in new money, making Johnson the highest paid right tackle in the NFL. The contract has $55.845 million guaranteed for injury of which $25 million is fully guaranteed at signing. Johnson received a $3 million signing bonus and has multiple option bonuses in his contract. The option bonuses are functionally guaranteed through the use of guaranteed escalators. There are various incentives in the contract that can change the timing of the salary cap charges and we are presenting the most likely order in which they will be earned as part of the cap charges. There are training camp roster bonuses in the final two years of the contract and annual workout bonuses throughout the contract. The final three years of the contract are void years included for cap purposes.”

Question is this – why now?


Couple of answers:

You can make room for in-season insurance, in case you need to sign an injury replacement. You also have extensions that need to be done, and require cap space to execute. There’s flexibility created by doing this. It just lets you address immediate needs and boot some dead cap down the road.