New York Jets fans are starting to put Aaron Rodgers’ Achilles tear in the rearview mirror. However, one critical result still stares them in the face: Haason Reddick’s holdout.
What does Rodgers’ injury have to do with Reddick’s situation, you ask?
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It all comes back to a salary cap mechanism that the Jets ignored.
In October 2023, Sportico reported that the Jets had failed to insure Rodgers’ contract. They could have recouped up to $22 million of Rodgers’ fully guaranteed $37.5 million salary had they bought insurance. The Packers previously had insurance on Rodgers’ contract, but the Jets declined to continue it when they renegotiated the deal.
This was a massive error in and of itself. Rodgers was nearly 40 years old. The extent to which the Jets cast their chips in the middle of the table on Rodgers’ health and success is appalling in hindsight. They refused to contemplate a scenario in which Rodgers got injured.
However, compounding this mistake was what it cost them in salary cap space. According to an ESPN report by Kalyn Kahler, “If a player who eats up a significant portion of a club’s salary cap misses significant time with injury or illness, a club doesn’t have to take it as a total loss, but can recover space for the following year. Plus, insurance premium payments don’t count against the salary cap.”
In other words, if a team has insurance on an injured player whose contract takes up a large portion of the salary cap, they can roll over those cap savings into the following season. Had the Jets insured Rodgers, they could have rolled over up to $22 million in cap savings for 2024.
Maybe it’s presumptuous to believe the Jets would have used that cap space to give Reddick a new deal. Perhaps they would have re-signed Bryce Huff and/or retained John Franklin-Myers. But it’s difficult not to link this colossal error by Joe Douglas et al. to the team’s current predicament.
Other teams that have lost their starting quarterbacks did not make the same mistake. The Bengals, Dolphins, and Packers all have insurance on their big-money passers. According to one cap executive, the number of contracts with insurance policies has doubled in the past five years. This may have come as a result of high-profile quarterback injuries and rapid increases in guaranteed money.
Kahler cited an unnamed cap executive who stated, “It’s usually the teams that get absolutely steamrolled into overpaying a player [that buy insurance], and so it’s like [the front office’s] saving grace to try to present it to ownership. It’s like, ‘We’ll get your money back if he gets hurt.'”
According to Kahler, the Eagles, where Joe Douglas’ roots are, insure their players at the highest rate in the NFL. However, former Jets general manager John Idzik stated ownership must buy in to purchasing contract insurance. Therefore, Woody Johnson may have been the one to balk at the idea rather than Douglas.
Sportico’s report claimed the Jets have not bought contract insurance in at least 10 years. Idzik would not confirm or deny the report except to state that it was under discussion when he signed players.
While it may seem like an obvious move, insurance premiums on contracts have risen dramatically in recent seasons. Therefore, the cost-benefit analysis may not be as clear-cut as it seems. The cap credit for the following season is seemingly an added inducement for some teams, though.
Whether or not insurance makes sense as a general principle is different from whether the Jets should have purchased it for Rodgers. Maybe a team is willing to play with fire on other high-profile players, but for an aging quarterback, it should have been a no-brainer.
There are many “coulda, woulda, shoulda” scenarios the Jets can look back at from 2023. Unfortunately, not all are quite behind them.
