With Aaron Rodgers announcing he’s back for Year 18 and Davante Adams retained with the franchise tag, the Green Bay Packers will attack the rest of the season as aggressively as possible given the constraints of the salary cap.
The Packers were about $26.4 million over the cap at the start of business on Tuesday, Tagging Adams added another $20.145 million to that total, pushing Green Bay’s overage to $45.8 million.
The idea behind keeping Rodgers and Adams is a simple one. After his team came up short in three consecutive postseasons, general manager Brian Gutekunst will reload every year until Rodgers retires and deal with the financial consequences as they come.
It won’t be easy but there is a blueprint.
“The Packers will look to keep core players to low cap hits by handing out large signing bonuses,” noted Mike Tannenbaum, the former NFL general manager and founder of The 33rd Team. This is the strategy the New Orleans Saints used when Drew Brees was in his final years with the team. In the last four seasons of Brees’ legendary career, the Saints were the winningest team in the NFL with a 49-15 regular-season record.”
Gutekunst and vice president/director of football operations Russ Ball have a lot of work to do to get beneath the salary cap by the start of the league-year on March 16.
The forthcoming extension for Rodgers will lop off some of the cap deficit. One example outlined by Tannenbaum would save more than $10 million vs. Rodgers’ current cap charge of $46.66 million.
Another option would be a smaller signing bonus but big start-of-year roster bonuses that would kick in for 2023, 2024 and 2025. For the sake of easy math, a $60 million signing bonus prorated over four years would result in $15 million annual cap hits. A $30 million signing bonus (with $10 million roster bonuses for 2023, 2024 and 2015) would result in a $7.5 million cap hit for 2022 but obviously significantly larger charges the next three seasons. That method also would protect the team should Rodgers retire, though the four-time MVP might balk at that approach.
Extensions for cornerback Jaire Alexander ($13.294 million cap charge in 2022 under fifth-year option) and Preston Smith ($19.72 million cap charge in 2022) could happen in the next week. The goal, as it will be with Adams, will be to lock up those players for the long haul, and create enough cap dollars to build the rest of the roster, by kicking into the future as much of the financial pain as possible.
Will it work? Who knows? The Saints’ approach created nothing but pain as Brees couldn’t get them back to the Super Bowl. What is certain is signing Rodgers, Adams, etc. to standard contracts and gutting the roster won’t work, either.
“The idea of pushing cap hits out to the future can lead to headaches down the line,” Tannenbaum noted, “but it is a necessary evil when you are trying to keep a very talented and veteran roster intact.”
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