What to Know: Contract details for Packers and All-Pro Keisean Nixon
By Paul Bretl
The Green Bay Packers will re-sign All-Pro return man Keisean Nixon to a one-year, $6 million deal once free agency officially begins on Wednesday. Here is a closer look at those contract details.
According to Ken Ingalls, who independently monitors the Packers’ salary cap situation, Nixon’s deal comes with a base salary of $1.35 million and a signing bonus of $1.85 million. On top of that, Nixon will receive a $500,000 per game bonus and a $300,000 offseason workout bonus.
In total, that is $4 million in cash that Nixon will receive. He also has the opportunity to earn an additional $2 million in incentives based on playing time, interceptions, and whether he is named a Pro Bowler.
The cap hit in 2023 from this deal will vary depending on if void years were used or not. As the Packers have dealt with a shortage in salary cap space the past few offseaons, the utilization of void years on new deals or restructures has been somewhat common for them.
In short, void years are a bookkeeping tactic that, on paper, adds additional years to the contract for cap charges to be pushed to, thus lowering the cap hit in the current year. If this strategy is utilized by Green Bay, this is still a one-year contract for Nixon, and when the deal terminates next offseason, the cap charges pushed to the void years will come due in 2024 unless an extension is reached beforehand.
If no void years were used, Nixon’s cap hit will be $4 million, according to Ingalls, but it could be as low as $2.5 million if multiple void years were used.
Despite the Packers’ tight salary cap situation, re-signing Nixon always should have been a top priority for Green Bay this offseason, given his, at times, game-changing impact as a return man, where he was an All-Pro and ranked fifth in both kick and punt return averages. In addition to special teams, Nixon also provides Green Bay with needed cornerback depth, and was a willing tackler and run defender from the slot last season.
Prior to this signing, the Packers had $24.04 million in available cap space, according to Over the Cap. They’ll now have between $20 million and $21.5 million depending on Nixon’s cap hit and of void years were used.
As I’ve written about often recently, it’s important to keep in mind that if Aaron Rodgers is traded, the Packers’ salary cap space will drop by roughly $8.7 million due to additional dead cap on the books. They still have a few contract restructure candidates available to create cap space, but nothing substantial.
This will, in all likelihood, be another relatively quiet offseason for the Packers from a free-agency standpoint, but getting Nixon back and with a relatively low cap hit is a big win.