A few years of restructuring contracts and kicking the can down the road via the addition of void years will cost the Green Bay Packers on the salary cap in 2023.
Seven voiding contracts will add almost $16.4 million of dead money on the Packers’ salary cap this coming year, and it’s possible all seven players won’t be back on the 2023 roster.
Here are the players with voiding deals and the associated dead cap charges:
S Adrian Amos: $7,950,000
DL Dean Lowry: $3,007,875
DL Jarran Reed: $1,492,000
WR Randall Cobb: $1,391,668
TE Marcedes Lewis: $1,050,000
K Mason Crosby: $1,005,000
TE Robert Tonyan: $500,000
The total is $16,396,543 of dead cap. Based on a predicted $225 million salary cap, the dead cap from voided deals would equate to roughly seven percent of the total cap.
The contracts void before the start of the new league year.
Adding void years has become a common salary-cap maneuver for teams to help spread out prorated bonuses over more years on a deal. The Packers have used it often since 2020. For instance: In March, the Packers signed Reed to a one-year deal with a signing bonus of $1.865 million. Adding four void years to the deal allowed the Packers to count just $373,000 of his signing bonus on the 2022 salary cap ($373,000 = $1.865 million divided by five total years), lowering his cap hit by almost $1.5 million. But now, when the deal officially voids, the entire $1,492,000 of prorated money must hit the cap in 2023.
The same goes for restructuring. The Packers kept pushing money into the future on Amos’ deal using the conversion of base salary and roster bonuses into signing bonuses with the addition of void years. Lowering the cap hits in 2021 and 2022 now means the bill comes due in 2023.
As noted by Ken Ingalls, there is a scenario – especially for a player like Amos – where the Packers could extend a contract before it voids and reduce the cap charge in 2023 while also keeping the player. But it’s unlikely to happen given the timing of the void and the player’s likely preference for getting to the open market.
The most probable scenario is that all seven deals officially void. The Packers can still bring any of the players back, but the dead cap won’t go away and will just be added to the cap charge of the new deal.
Last year, the Packers re-signed Tonyan and linebacker De’Vondre Campbell after both entered free agency following a voided contract.
