A Couple Of Homely Restructures For Clark and Aaron Jones

As expected, the Packers dipped deeply into the contract of Kenny Clark to extract cap savings.  I guessed that they would take around $10M and they took $10.89 million.  That is 92% of the amount theoretically possible.  The Packers did not convert Clark’s $700,000 workout bonus or his $550,000 game active bonus into a signing bonus.  

This is the first restructure for Clark.  Just a reminder of what it looked like originally:

Clark’s contract excaped last year simply because he was paid just $1 million in base pay and $1.1M in workout and game active bonuses.  In other words, there was very little that could be converted to a signing bonus.  Now let’s look at his contract after his first extension.

The most significant change is the more than doubling of Clark’s dead money charge in 2023 from $10 million to $20.892 million.  Clark is young, pretty durable, and good, so it probably will not matter as long as he does not get injured.  Clark’s average cap hit for 2023 and 2024 moves to $24.35 million, which is within hailing distance of the $25.5 million average Aaron Donald is scheduled for in the remaining three seasons of his contract.  

As Jason Fitzgerald of OTC noted:  “Frankly that gives the Packers no leverage if Clark’s play were to decline this year. They would only save $3 million with a release at that point. Even if they were to get Clark to accept a pay cut it would not be as steep of a pay cut as it would have been otherwise. A team can also wind up in an extension with a player almost solely because of salary cap purposes.  He added: “One of the reasons many teams moved away from the large signing bonus contract structures of the past is because they would wind up with aging football players who they were unable to cut because of cap consequences.”

Still, Clark’s contract is just homely, not a truly ugly contract, and Aaron Jones’ newly restructured deal is much the same.  In truth, it looks rather ugly to me, but the numbers are not quite big enough to make fans recoil from the numbers.  For ugly, we will have to wait for Bakhtiari’s new deal when it comes down the pike (and probably one or two others). 

Aaron Jones Contract:

This was always something of a monster.  It was not perceived as such in part because the deal was reached on March 14, 2020, long before fans knew about Aaron Rodgers’ unhappiness.  Still, the contract serves much the same purpose now that it did then: it extends the window in which the Packers can try to win a Lombardi Trophy. 

It initially was a 2-year deal for $19.9M with $6.5M dead.  The Packers were never going to pay Jones $16 million in cash for the 2024 season ($8.1M + $7M + $.4M + $.5M).  The restructure saves $3.08M (I had estimated $3.05M).  This restructure was expected, but I thought it might be one of the last ones to be reached, and then only if necessary.  It also was one of the easier ones to reach.  

These two restructures are just homely because this is the first time they have been altered to create salary cap space.  The ones coming down the pike figure to be uglier.