The Cleveland Browns have a big problem with kicker Dustin Hopkins.
And it’s an unexpected problem as well, coming fresh off of the best season a kicker has ever had in Browns franchise history in 2023. However, this season has been nothing short of a disaster for Hopkins after a career year.
This year, however, Hopkins is making kicks at an NFL-low rate of just 64 percent. He missed two against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday, he missed one against the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football in Week 13, and all-in-all has missed a whopping nine kicks and two extra points on the year.
To make matters worse, the Browns just handed him a new three-year contract worth over $15 million before the start of the season.
That makes it incredibly difficult for the Browns to do anything but ride it out with Hopkins at least through the rest of the 2024 season.
What the books would look like for the Browns to cut Dustin Hopkins
To cut him after the season as a post-June 1 release, the Browns would eat over $3.5 million in dead money to do so. The other problem is that teams can only designate two players as Post-June 1 releases, and the void years of Jedrick Wills are a priority in that regard. Safety Juan Thornhill and offensive tackle Jack Conklin are other candidates as well.
This means that if the Browns want to cut Hopkins, they would likely have to instead eat over $5.6 million in dead money while also receiving a cap penalty of $2.7 million (all numbers according to Over the Cap).
Could the Browns trade Dustin Hopkins instead?
The only other solution would be to work an NBA-style salary dump trade where the Browns might be able to trade Hopkins and a superior draft asset to a team with a lot of cap space for a worse draft asset in return. The Browns did this on a larger scale when they took on the contract of quarterback Brock Osweiler in exchange for a second round pick.
If the Browns were able to trade him this offseason in a salary dump-type move, they would only have to eat $2.8 million in dead cap in 2025 if done before June 1. If done after June 1, the Browns would just have to eat $718,000 of dead cap each year over the next four years while seeing significant savings against the cap.
Regardless, this is way too many financial hurdles to have to work through for a kicker. But it’s a situation the Browns find themselves in with Hopkins.
