Packers Push More Cap Charges to 2022 to Free Up Cap Space in 2021
By Paul Bretl
In order to keep most of the key players from the 2020 roster together for the 2021 season while still staying under the shrunken 2021 salary cap, it took some creative financial maneuvering by Brian Gutekunst and Russ Ball to get the Green Bay Packers under the $182.5 million cap figure.
However, they apparently aren’t done yet. According to Field Yates of ESPN, the Packers converted $1.213 million of Chandon Sullivan’s base salary into a signing bonus and added four voided years to the contract. The end result was Green Bay saving $970,400 in cap space this season.
On a typical contract restructure, teams convert a player’s base salary to a signing bonus which can then be spread out over the life of the deal, effectively lowering the cap hit that season because instead of incurring the full amount of the cap hit from the converted portion of the contract, it is now equally divided among the remaining years of the deal.
But in Sullivan’s case, 2021 is the final year of his current contract–meaning there were no additional years to push the cap charges too. This is why the Green Bay Packers tacked on four voided years.
In reality, Sulivan’s contract still expires after this season, but on paper, the Packers now have five years to spread out the $1.213 million converted signing bonus–thus resulting in the $970,400 in cap space created.
Again, it’s important to remember that those voided years are only for bookkeeping purposes. When Sullivan’s contract expires after this season, the cap charges that were pushed to those four voided years all come due and hit the books in 2022.
This is certainly not the first time this offseason that the Green Bay Packers have used this strategy to create cap space. In fact, they’ve used it quite a bit. According to Packers’ salary cap guru Ken Ingalls, the Packers have kicked $29.2 million worth of cap charges from 2021 to 2022.
If that alone doesn’t tell you that the Green Bay Packers are all-in on the 2021 season, then I’m not sure what will.
By Ingalls’ calculations, Green Bay now has $7.79 million in available cap space for this season. Earlier in the offseason, all of these financial moves were necessary to keep the team together but also to get under the salary cap.
However, as I wrote in an article about a month ago, given some of the recent financial gymnastics that have taken place — Sullivan’s restructure, the reworking of Randall Cobb’s deal, etc. — it would appear that the Packers are positioning themselves for another addition.
Now, that doesn’t mean there will be a new signing or a trade in the coming days. But for a team that is clearly all-in on winning in 2021, it would certainly appear that they want to have the financial flexibility to make a mid-season addition or to participate at the trade deadline.
Ultimately we will have to wait and see if that is how things actually play out, but it sure seems that way. Otherwise, why would they push even more cap charges to 2022 when they are already going to be faced with a number of difficult financial decisions? It’s not as if they needed more cap space for 2021 if they were planning to operate as is.
According to Over the Cap, the Green Bay Packers are currently projected to be $39.047 million over the 2022 salary cap.