The Kansas City Chiefs created a little cap space to give themselves some breathing room during free agency.
According to ESPN’s Field Yates, the Chiefs have restructured the contract of Joe Thuney. They’ve converted a portion of his $13.9 million base salary for the 2022 NFL season into a signing bonus, which clears over $9.6 million in cap space.
This brings Thuney’s cap number for the 2022 NFL seasons down to about $8 million. The bonus money is now prorated over the life of the contract, meaning that Thuney’s cap number will go up in each of the three years remaining on his contract. In 2023, for instance, Thuney’s cap number will now be around $22 million for Kansas City when it was set to be $19 million prior to the restructure.
The Chiefs are converting $12.865M of G Joe Thuney’s base salary into a signing bonus, creating $9,648,750 in 2022 cap space.
— Field Yates (@FieldYates) March 22, 2022
Despite this contract restructure being reported today, it’s likely that it already happened and that the Chiefs have already spent the majority of this cap space already. The team did free up some cap space by reworking Frank Clark’s contract previously, but that was only to get them under the cap by the March 16th deadline. It wasn’t exactly enough space to accommodate all of the signings and re-signings they’ve made during the free agency period.
This type of contract restructuring was one of the many ways that the team could create cap space this offseason. The team has a few more contracts (Patrick Mahomes, Chris Jones, Travis Kelce) that they were able to do this type of salary to signing bonus conversion with, but it’s unclear if they made those moves or not.
