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The other day, I wrote an article on the moves the Giants made with Corey Webster and David Baas (that article can be found by clicking here). For those who don’t want to revisit the whole story, this was the portion written about Webster:
“First, let’s take a look at Webster. 2013 will be the final season of a five-year extension he signed with the Giants in December 2008. His base salary was originally set at $7 million for this season while various other bonuses brought his cap hit to $9.845 million. All Webster agreed to do here was reduce his base salary to $4 million; there’s no real restructure, only a reduction in money for Webster. No additional cap hits come into play for the Giants and as a result, Webster’s 2013 cap hit is now a more reasonable $6.845 million. If for whatever reason the Giants turn around and decide to release Webster, his release would result in a net cap savings of $4.25 million (the only portion of Webster’s contract that’s guaranteed to be on the cap is hit is his $2.595 million in bonuses). Webster didn’t have much negotiating room to do anything other than take this pay cut; he graded out 110th out of 113 qualifiers in ProFootballFocus’ 2012 cornerback rankings. Even with his reduction in salary, Webster still has the 5th highest cap hit on the Giants this year as of now. He would have had the 3rd-highest on the team, behind only Eli Manning and Chris Snee, had he not agreed to this reduction.”
According to a ProFootballTalk post last night, this wasn’t exactly the case with Webster’s deal. Per Mike Florio, Webster’s $7 million base salary and $250,000 workout bonus became a $1.25 million base salary, $2.5 million signing bonus, while the workout bonus remains the same. To help out with the cap this year, the Giants added a voidable season in 2014 to the contract, thus pushing $1.25 of that $2.5 million signing bonus to this voidable year due to the proration. Let’s take a look at what the Giants’ cap hit would look like in both 2013 and 2014 had the deal been as reported earlier, and as it’s being reported now:
Updated cap hits without voidable year:
2013: $6.845 million ($4 million base salary + $2.595 million prorated from various signing bonuses + $250,000 workout bonus)
2014: $0
Updated cap hits with voidable year:
2013: $5,345,000 ($1.25 million base salary + $2.595 million prorated from various signing bonuses + $1.25 million prorated from new signing bonus + $250,000 workout bonus)
2014 (voidable year): $2,250,000 ($1 million base salary + $1.25 million prorated from new signing bonus)
As Jason wrote the other day here, voidable seasons are often extremely easy to achieve and are done simply to lower cap costs now, which also happens to increase dead money costs down the line. As a result of this restructure, the Giants now save $4.5 mill in cap space for 2013 (they would have saved $3 million in 2013 had the deal been as reported on Thursday). Instead, this voidable year in 2014 creates $1.25 million of dead money on the Giants salary cap in 2014. The 2014 figures would be a great contract for the Giants if, of course, the year wasn’t voidable and Webster was actually going to play for the team on a $2.250 million cap hit. Instead, dead money gets pushed forward a year on the Giants’ cap. As mentioned in Jason’s article I referenced above, adding voidable seasons to create a bit of extra space now while pushing dead money forward in the future just isn’t a sound practice, but Webster’s deal is far from the most egregious example of that.
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