NY Jets salary cap primer, part 1: Basic contract structure

Making sense of the New York Jets’ salary cap situation

“I can’t do ______.”

While everyone would fill in that blank differently, there’s one almost universal response: math. As a former math teacher, I still get that response whenever I tell people what my profession once was. It’s somehow fashionable and cool.

However, if you’re a New York Jets fan, that limitation can be maddening around this time of year. Trying to understand what the Jets are going to do or should do is tough when you have no clue what the salary cap is or the ramifications of any of their moves.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the cap and the various mechanisms to help and hurt teams as they seek to get under it. Therefore, to understand the direction of the Jets’ offseason, we’re going to start a series of articles on the salary cap to explain the madness.

To begin, we’ll discuss basic contract structure.

Basic contract structures

When you go to Over the Cap or Spotrac, the two main sites covering NFL contracts and the salary cap, they will list a contract together with the cap ramifications for releases or trades.

When a player signs a contract, there are generally the following payment options:

• Base salary
• Signing bonus
• Roster bonus
• Workout bonus

There are others, but these are the most basic ones you’ll see when a player initially signs before any modifications to the contract.

Signing bonus

Let’s start with the signing bonus. The player receives this money up front when he signs the contract. The advantage is that the team can spread out the cap hit over the length of the contract, up to five years. For example, if a player has a $15 million signing bonus on a three-year deal, the team will spread out the bonus evenly over three seasons for a $5 million cap hit per season (just from the bonus).

Instead of signing bonus, you will see the term prorated bonus on Over the Cap. This includes the original signing bonus and any future restructures. We will explain this more clearly in the restructure article, but this is how to transfer the information between sites: Spotrac lists the signing bonus and restructure bonus separately, while Over the Cap lists it all together under “prorated bonus.”

Base salary

Base salary is the player’s salary for each season they play. The amount of guaranteed base salary is a big part of the contract negotiation. If a player has a guaranteed base salary, the team will owe that money even if they release the player, and thus it will count against their cap. If they trade him, though, the base salary will transfer to the acquiring team’s salary cap. (We’ll discuss this further in the article about trades.)

Roster bonus

A roster bonus is generally a bonus a player receives at a specific date if they’re still on the roster. Roster bonuses often force teams to make quick decisions about whether to keep or release a player, which is why they commonly trigger within a few days of the start of the new league year.

Per-game bonus

There are also per-game (roster) bonuses for being active on game day. Dalvin Cook had such a bonus structure. (One wonders why the Jets didn’t deactivate him once it became evident that he was washed up.)

Even though Spotrac and Over the Cap might list a per-game roster bonus with a total, that’s the maximum per-game bonus the player can earn if they are active for all 17 games. That’s why, if it’s listed at $510,000, it means the player is earning $510,000 / 17 = $30,000 in per-game bonuses.

Workout bonus

A workout bonus is usually for a lower sum and doesn’t materially affect the salary cap. It’s a bonus for attending offseason workouts.

Guarantee announcements

When a player signs a contract and reports come out with the amount of guaranteed money, the initial information is difficult to decipher until the details of the contract come out. To most clearly illustrate this, let’s look at the contract of Broncos right tackle Mike McGlinchey, who signed a five-year, $87.5 million deal in the 2023 offseason. The reports said that $52.5 million is guaranteed for injury and $35 million is guaranteed at signing.

Here’s how that breaks down.

(Note: when Over the Cap lists guaranteed salary for a particular year, they’re not including the signing bonus — only the guaranteed base salary and roster bonus for the season.)

McGlinchey’s signing bonus was $17.5 million in total, which he received up front at signing. He has a guaranteed base salary in 2023-24, totaling another $17.5 million. That’s where the $35 million guaranteed at signing total comes from.

Meanwhile, McGlinchey’s $17.5 million 2025 salary is guaranteed for injury, which means that it will kick in if he sustains a football injury before then. The 2025 salary becomes fully guaranteed on the fifth day of the 2024 league year. Meanwhile, his 2026 and 2027 salaries are not guaranteed, which means that if the Broncos released him then, they would not owe him any of that base salary.

With the basic contract structure nailed down, we’ll get to some of the really dizzying terms later.