With The Saints still having to clear a bunch of money for cap purposes on March 17th the Saints went to a bit of an unlikely source for salary cap relief- Taysom Hill
Saints are restructuring QB Taysom Hill’s contract to create cap room. Details are great: it’s a 4-year, $140 million contract extension – but all years are voidable and it’s a mechanism to free up cap space this year, per source. It saves Saints over $7.5M against cap this year.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 14, 2021
The part of Schefter’s tweet that has everyone up in arms isn’t so much the salary cap savings part but the news of a $140 million extension worth $35 million a year that is voidable. Void years are common but rarely is the word “extension” tacked onto it. While I don’t have the exact details of what they did I’ll just give you my thoughts on what they are trying to accomplish here and how they will wind up doing it.
Hill was set to count on the Saints salary cap this season at a pretty high number of $16.159 million. Since this was the final year of his contract the only way to bring that cap number down is through the use of void years in the contract. Adam mentioned moving his salary cap number down by about $7.5 million so here might be an example of what they did to get around that number in savings.
| Year | Base Salary | Current Proration | Restructure Bonus | Roster Bonus | Cap Charge | Dead |
| 2021 | $1,300,000 | $4,000,000 | $1,884,000 | $1,439,000 | $8,623,000 | $16,159,000 |
| 2022 | $0 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $7,536,000 |
| 2023 | $0 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 |
| 2024 | $0 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 |
| 2025 | $0 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 |
This would be a typical restructure for cap purposes to save around $7.5 million from his current charge. The important thing to consider here though is that the contract will void leaving the Saints with a charge of $7.536 million in 2022 on the cap. The Saints still have salary cap issues and that is a hard pill to swallow for a player who may or may not be on the roster next year. So what if they get creative and make this a big extension? How might that look?
| Year | Base Salary | Current Proration | Restructure Bonus | Roster Bonus | Cap Charge | Dead |
| 2021 | $1,300,000 | $4,000,000 | $1,884,000 | $1,439,000 | $8,623,000 | $16,159,000 |
| 2022 | $2,500,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $4,384,000 | $7,536,000 |
| 2023 | $3,965,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $40,000,000 | $45,849,000 | $5,652,000 |
| 2024 | $40,000,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $41,884,000 | $3,768,000 |
| 2025 | $53,535,000 | $0 | $1,884,000 | $0 | $55,419,000 | $1,884,000 |
The difference here lies in what could effectively be a voiding mechanism. Let’s say as terms of this “extension” Hill is guaranteed his 2022 base salary and his 2023 roster bonus if he is on the roster on the 2nd day of the 2023 league year. Under this scenario the Saints would be able to wait until the start of the 2022 league year to use the post June 1 designation on Hill to effectively void the contract. This allows the team to carry him during free agency at a charge of around $4.4 million rather than the dead charge of $7.536 million. On June 2nd they would pick up an additional $2.5 million in cap room and thus only account for $1.884 million in dead money in 2022 and kick the can to 2023 where they would stash the other $5.652 million. If he is great they can just opt into the deal basically at Russell Wilson money.
This is something I suggested that the Saints and Eagles might do with their QBs in some manner last year and the Eagles did wind up doing it with Alshon Jeffery and Malik Jackson. I thought it was an incredibly creative way for them to manipulate the salary cap over a two year period and that’s why whenever I hear this I call it the Eagles June 1 trick. The Saints effectively did the same when they redid Drew Brees contract a few weeks ago in preparation for his retirement.
Anyway this is just my guess as to what they did. It is entirely possible that they are just throwing a bunch of dummy years in there with massive salaries and are getting a kick out of all of us going crazy it is being reported as Taysom Hill signing a $140 million extension, but these are the ways that it would make sense in light of the reports using the extension phrase.