Packers restructure Dean Lowry’s deal, what move is incoming?

With the Green Bay Packers pushing their salary cap to the near max once again in 2022, it’s not as if they have many cap-saving moves left at their disposal. However, they decided to utilize one of their few remaining moves on Tuesday by restructuring Dean Lowry’s contract.

With Lowry in the final year of his current deal, the Packers converted $1.5 million of his base salary to a signing bonus, which creates roughly $1.1 million in cap space for 2022, according to Field Yates.

Although Lowry is technically in the final year of his contract, through past restructures, he has three voided years on his deal for 2023, 2024, and 2025. Voided years are simply a bookkeeping tactic to help create cap space in the current year. When Lowry’s contract terminates in the upcoming offseason, all of the cap charges pushed to those voided years will come due and count towards the Packers’ 2023 cap space.

Following the recent restructure, Ken Ingalls projects that $1.28 million in dead cap will be added to the already $1.86 million dead cap total in 2023 that had already been accumulated.

At 4-8 and Green Bay on the verge of being eliminated from the playoffs, this is an interesting move to make by the Packers, to say the least. They entered the day with $5.57 million in cap space available, according to Over the Cap, which should have been plenty for them to navigate the remainder of the season with. So perhaps this means that there is another move incoming that they are preparing for.

Ken, who independently tracks the Packers’ salary cap, offered two potential moves that Green Bay could be looking to make with their newfound cap space. The first is an extension for Rashan Gary, with the additional cap space freed up from Lowry’s restructure going towards a signing bonus for Gary that would count against the 2022 salary cap.

Gary, who unfortunately suffered a season-ending injury against Detroit, has become one of the most disruptive edge rushers in football. Prior to his injury, he had totaled 38 pressures, including six sacks, and he still ranks 12th in PFF’s pass rush win rate metric among edge rushers.

Gary was playing out the final year of his rookie deal in 2022, but Green Bay had already picked up his fifth-year option for 2023 last spring. His fifth-year option is expected to be around $11 million, and all of that will fall on the 2023 salary cap, where the Packers are once again going to be under a tight budget.

An extension, however, not only keeps Gary in Green Bay beyond 2023, but it would help lower his cap hit next season as well by providing more years for those cap charges to be spread out over.

Another extension candidate that I’ll mention is Elgton Jenkins, who is also in the final year of his rookie deal but doesn’t have a fifth year option for 2023 since he wasn’t a first round pick. Jenkins’ play has been up and down since returning from injury, but in recent weeks, he appears to be settling in back at left guard.

So while a possible extension is option one, Ken’s other guess as to why the Packers reworked Lowry’s deal is that the team could be planning to move several veterans to IR once eliminated from the playoffs, and they’ll need added cap space to sign replacements to the active roster.

We will wait and see whether or not a corresponding move is going to be made, but given where the Packers are at in the season, along with their current and future cap situations, the Lowry restructure is a bit out of nowhere if it is, in fact, a standalone move.