Thinking I should just cut the Saints out from this? pic.twitter.com/uPlGNLKRCf
— Jason_OTC (@Jason_OTC) June 25, 2023
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Over The Cap’s Jason Fitzgerald shared a chart displaying the three-year trend of contract restructure utilization and wins per season, and the New Orleans Saints broke the model.
Take a look at it. You’ll see many teams clustered near the NFL average, though notoriously spendthrift operations like the Cincinnati Bengals and Washington Commanders have almost never restructured a contract in recent years — with other teams like the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, and Green Bay Packers way out in front, nearing 15% of their potential.
Well, almost in front. They’re all competing for second place behind the Saints. No team has restructured more contracts with as much frequency over the last three years than New Orleans (35%). As Fitzgerald observed, including the Saints at all might muddy the data and make it tough to tell what’s going on here.
Remember, restructures are nothing new. Teams have always converted salaries into signing bonuses so they’re paid out on a different schedule to more easily fit everyone under the salary cap. What the Saints have done differently is taking what was a little-known accounting quirk and weaponized it, matching the pace of their spending with the annual rise of the salary cap so they won’t have to pay a hefty bill.
Things kind of went sideways for them during the COVID-19 pandemic, which introduced unique pressures to the NFL’s cap calculations. Instead of rising as expected the cap dipped, forcing the Saints to cut contracts they’d planned on keeping and restructured others with players they didn’t anticipate. For the 2020 and 2021 seasons at least, the Saints did everything they could just to get by.
So it’s a relief to see things returning to normalcy. The Saints’ cap situation is improving, slowly but surely, and they’re ranking among the league’s highest spenders now that they’ve paid the price for that creative accounting when the cap was more restrictive. They’re still restructuring more contracts than most teams, sure, and that’s going to be the case again in 2024. But things are in a much better space for 2023 than we saw in years past, and that should be our takeaway.
