Bengals have every reason to restructure Orlando Brown Jr.'s contract before free agency begins

The Cincinnati Bengals did more than find their left tackle last year by signing Orlando Brown Jr. to a four-year contract. They also made franchise history with the stroke of a pen.

Brown's $64 million deal paid him the largest signing bonus in team history at the time before Joe Burrow set that record himself a few months later. Cincinnati paid Brown just over $31 million soon after Brown put pen to paper last March.

The Bengals can make more contractual history with Brown a year later with a savvy move they'd be silly not to make: restructuring his contract.

There's never been a recorded restructured contract in the history of the Bengals. It's one of the few remaining barriers of conservatism that has held the franchise back from total modernization. It's not a foolproof strategy most of the time, but when utilized in situations such as this, it makes more sense to act than not. Here's how it can go down.

How the NFL restructures player contracts

There's a common disconnect when it comes to restructured contracts in the NFL. A restructure does not involve in adding or removing money from the contract. It simply moves around where the money is, when it gets paid to the player, and how much of it goes on the cap. 

Most restructures are simply a conversion, as noted by Over The Cap's definition:

"The conversion of scheduled payments such as base salary or roster bonuses into signing bonuses that are prorated equally across the length of the contract, over a maximum of five years."

Teams can convert the majority of player's base salary for the upcoming season into a signing bonus that gets prorated throughout the remainder of the deal. Teams also have the option to do this for non-prorated bonuses such as a roster bonus, or they can add void years on the end of existing deals. 

Why is this common practice? By putting salary or roster bonus money into a signing bonus, the money gets spread out on the salary cap, which minimizes the salary cap hit for the current year. Added void years can also carry prorated cap hits, which can spread things out even more. 

Clubs do it to save current cap space, and players agree to it because it gets them their money faster.

How the Bengals can restructure Orlando Brown Jr.'s contract

Here's how the Bengals would restructure Brown's contract. Brown is owed a $3 million roster bonus on March 18, and he's scheduled to earn $4.5 million in salary payments throughout the course of the season. His 2024 cap hit comes out to $16.398 million.

The Bengals can't convert his entire base salary into a signing bonus because they still have to pay every player a minimum salary for the season. They can convert up to $3.375 million in order to leave the minimum $1.125 million salary for a player with his number of accrued seasons. The roster bonus can all go into a signing bonus, so no worries there.

In calculating the total savings, we simply divvy up the restructured money by the remaining years on his contract, which is three. One-third of the $3.375 million taken from the base salary and one-third of $3 million taken from the roster bonus gets added on to the existing $7.775 million prorated bonus portion of Brown's 2024 cap hit.

This increases the figure to $9.9 million, while his base salary goes down to $1.125 million, and his non-prorated bonuses go down to $1.123 million. Add up these numbers and you get a new 2024 cap hit of $12.148 million, which is smaller by $4.25 million compared to his current cap hit.

The math checks out

$4.25 million in cap savings is what the Bengals could easily create, and they'd only increase his 2025 and 2026 cap hits by a little over $2 million each. That's nothing when talking about a player who's in their plans for the entire length of his deal.

As for Brown, his cash earned remains the exact same. The only thing that changes is he gets some of his millions handed to him much earlier than expected. 

That's a win-win all around. 

$4.25 million in cap space is large enough to fit in an entirely new free agent signing this offseason, and the cost of doing so is essentially negligible. The Bengals have virtually zero excuse not to do this when they have a plethora of holes to fill in the coming weeks.