It's just math. All other sources contradict his numbers. Multiple ones have been posted to this very thread. Most outline any # of scenarios and none are how Rappaport lays it out.Originally Posted by DesertSteel
It's just math. All other sources contradict his numbers. Multiple ones have been posted to this very thread. Most outline any # of scenarios and none are how Rappaport lays it out.
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Fowler and Rap both have different versions from one another and both are different from others. Being different doesn't automatically make one wrong. I'm not ruling out that one or the other may be right.
But math makes them wrong. The Pittsburgh Steelers are responsible for 21 million in cap dollars for AB. Trade him, cut him, play him, or fire him into the sun, doesnt matter. Nothing changes they have to pay that cap hit at some point. Basically 21 million in 2019 or 7 million in 2019 and 14 million in 2020.
Unless I've really screwed up understanding the cap stuff I've read, there is not a magic scenario that gets the team off the hook for the 21 million.
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Don't ruin my offseason anymore than it has been!!
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Yet another Steelers reporter who says Steelers won’t take majority of the $21M cap hit. In spite of all the cap experts on this forum, I’m believing this is also the case.
Ed Bouchette: Again, that $21 million in cap space would be reduced by his salary and roster bonus that comes to $15 M. Not sure why people aren't getting their heads around that since I've reported it so many times. Also, it's past time the Steelers have players who actually conform to the word "team" and not "me" all the time.
no so fast ........
we do not know the wording of the contract , there could be language in there that prohibits him from being an idiot / legal issues/ drugs etc ....
he clearly has committed conduct detrimental to the team , he is clearly smoking dope , he is clearly a malcontent , he is clearly a domestic violence offender , he has clearly blown a gasket tossing furniture off a balcony towards the swimming pool ,he has clearly went off on local media ..... at what point has he went overboard ??
maybe no place based on his contract , but maybe several .............
Kenny Pickett is who I though he was .. Eagles problem now
I can't even tell what he's talking about, but there are only two scenarios.
1. Have him on the team, pay $15.125 million in salary in 2019, and $7.04 million more in cap charges from bonuses and restructures. Total 2019 cap charge: $22.165 million.
2. Don't have him on the team, pay $0 in salary, the same $7.04 million in cap charges we were going to take in 2019, and $7.04M each for 2020 and 2021 that we now eat all at once. Total 2019 cap charge: $21.12 million.
I guess there is a third way we could do it with a June 1 release, but we would have to pay his $2.5M roster bonus, making it $9.54M this year and $14.08M next year that we would eat.
The point that Ed is making is that our original $22M obligation for 2019 would go down by $15M by way of not having to pay his salary. Ok, that's true, but then it would go straight back up to $21M from a separate $14M dead money charge that is triggered by him being traded/released from his contract early. There is no situation in which we only take a $6M cap charge this year, and there isn't going to be no matter how many times he reports it. The absolute minimum is $9.5M this year with a June 1 release, and that is an unlikely case because it costs us even more overall.
People are getting confused because his $15M salary this year is almost the same as the $14M we eat if we do not have him on the team. You cannot get rid of the $15M without eating $14M. You can lower the $22M to $21M, not to $7M. You cannot lower the $21M to $6M. The $21M is what you get if you're already not paying his salary, you can't cut him again.
Not unless there is something radically different about this than with any other contract is there a way to reduce the total cost below $21M, or some rule that nobody knows about.
https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/pittsbur...io-brown-6702/
See you Space Cowboy ...
The shocking inability of people who are paid to understand this stuff to not understand it is comical.
Ed B appears to be confusing actual dollars with cap dollars and failing at basic addition and subtraction. Additionally, despite his multiple reports on it -- he is still wrong.
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Sure if he has some sort of personal conduct clause. Since that has not yet been reported and i believe that these contracts are public record or at least accessible to NFL reporters, I suspect there isn't one.
But I don't know and it would be cool if one of the handful of people who are paid to do this on a daily basis looked into it. I imagine it would take all of 3 minutes.
Meanwhile, Steelers Depot is at least attempting to investigate the various issues: https://steelersdepot.com/2019/02/br...y-suspend-him/
You don’t know he’s doing drugs or a domestic violence offender. That’s just you making up a story and taking a story and running with it. At this point, none of that has been proven to be true and one of them is just an assumption on your part.
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I Suppose we may or may not find out, but I’ll take his word for it at the moment.
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It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
FWIW, I believe any reports that AB is on the cap for less than 20 some million in 2019 is flat out wrong. The inability of many reporters and insiders to understand and communicate specific details are why I put very little stock in the majority of media reports using unnamed sources and open speculation. If these folks can't get the details squared away on a tangible thing that can be easily researched, why would I believe them on hard to figure intangible things?
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Maybe because they have access to people within the organization that we don’t?
Could be. But all the available evidence indicates Ed B is wrong. Combine that with his track record of wrong and I have little faith he ever bothers to get the details right.
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Is the a Steelers beat reporter that is explicitly stating differently? I mean with one access to the front office, not bloggers.
Don't know. Who even are the beat reporters? Aren't most behind paywalls now?
Like I said before, unless voodoo gets involved, Antonio Brown costs 21-22 million in 2019 cap dollars.
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You are definitely on record as saying that!!
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Trib-Review is not behind a paywall and FWIW the Post-Gazette paywall is easy to get around (delete and reinstall the app on your phone or other portable device/delete the P-G cookies on your laptop/desktop when you hit the limit on free articles)
I previously posted my agreement with Bouchette’s arithmetic and admit I was wrong. Bouchette is correct AB’s $2.5 million roster bonus and $12.5 million salary for 2019 will come off the books if they trade him by early March. If those obligations did not come off the books with a trade the salary cap hit in 2019 would be around $36 million, not $21 million.
But the acceleration of the amortized bonus money into 2019 does not increase its overall impact on the Steelers cap over time, just the period in which it hits the cap. Right now the hit is $7 million per year in 2019, 2020 and 2021. With a trade the hit is $21 million in 2019.
So I suppose it is like a three year loan where you were either going to pay it off over three years or right now. An additional $14 million gets pushed into 2019 but is no longer $$ you would currently have to pay (for cap purposes) in 2020 and 2021.
To deal with that additional cap hit now I guess you restructure or extend other contracts to push $$ you currently have to pay in 2019 into 2020 and 2021. Which means you restructure/extend a high paid vet who is likely to be on the roster through 2021. Ben is the most likely suspect (along with Pouncey & maybe DeCastro?) to push $14 milllion currently on the 2019 cap into 2020 and 2021 by a redo on those contracts.
Technically we do not "have" to do anything financially, as the overall cap hit this year is about the same whether Brown is on the team or not. We'd just have an (important) empty roster spot to fill and $1M to do that. Then we'd get $7M extra in 2020 and 2021, which we probably will have already used on stupid shit like extending Dupree or Burns. And we will also not be paying Brown's base salary of $11M next year or $12M in 2021, so we can use that too.
Essentially the result is that we would be tanking 2019, and giving ourselves an ok amount of cap room in the next couple years after that. A bunch of restructures could stop 2019 from sucking so badly, but push some of the suckiness into future years. No matter how you cut it, we would eat $21 million in dead money for nothing in return, the question is just how many years it's spread over.
Future cap space has a way of disappearing into thin air anyway on this team for some reason, so I just cannot get too excited about whatever we might get as a result of it.
See you Space Cowboy ...
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If they negotiate a trade, can an agreement be struck with the other team to kick in say....$12 million dollars that would then be used to lower AB's cap hit this season?
I'm curious. Does anyone know this?
I hear about teams trading away players, yet still paying a portion of that player's salary even though they are no longer on the team.
To put it a different way, can the Steelers trade Antonio Brown for a fourth round pick and have the other team make a cash payment of $12 million dollars that would then reduce Antonio Brown's cap hit in the 2019 season?....Or if the Steelers could trade him to another team for the exact amount of his cap number?
The issue seems to be his signing bonus. I don't know if getting a team with the cap room to absorb a large cash payment to alleviate his cap hit is possible.
I'm curious ito see f anyone knows the the answer to that question. That would be one way for the team to move on from Brown without having to eat that huge cap hit. They wouldn't get much in return....maybe a mid to late round draft pick, but they could free up enough room to really get aggressive in free agency if they could reduce his cap number.
I truly don't know.
I know there aren't many teams out there that would even be in a position to do something like that, but it is interesting to talk about as an option.
Nope. You can not shift the cap burden of already guaranteed bonus money via trade. I'm no expert but at least 3 links to websites that claim to be are floating around this thread. Universally they all conclude that the Steelers owe at least 21 million in cap dollars for contractual obligations to AB. A trade can move that money around between 2019 and 2020 but can not alter the amount.
I also think the thing that makes this hard is that cap dollars are not always the same as actual dollars. I think this is where the off set discussions come in. Sure, the Rooneys save some actual cash money by not paying the non bonus portions of AB'S contract but due to the often bizarre accounting math for the salary cap, it provides no savings or benefit in cap dollars.
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This is where the Steelers refusal to guarantee any portion of salaries after the first year of the contract (see, e.g., L. Bell) locks them in to certain consequences
This excerpt from the linked article discusses how the Eagles were able to trade a player to the Pats and have the Pats take part of the guaranteed $$ as part of the trade
Prior to the trade deadline of the 2013 season, the Philadelphia Eagles traded Isaac Sopoaga to the New England Patriots for marginal draft pick compensation.
However, the transaction was somewhat surprising due to the fact that the Eagles had just signed Sopoaga to a three-year contract in free agency prior to the season. The contract, worth a total of $11 million, included $4.75 million worth of guaranteed money. The guaranteed money came in the form of a $2.75 million roster bonus in 2013, a $1 million guaranteed base salary in 2013, and $1 million of the $3.75 million 2014 base salary guaranteed.
This final portion of guaranteed money is what makes this transaction interesting and potentially precedent setting. The Eagles, having apparently decided that they did not want Sopoaga on the team anymore, managed to trade not only the player, but also the $1 million worth of guaranteed money, to the Patriots. If the Eagles had released Sopoaga in the spring of 2014, this $1 million worth of guaranteed money would have become $1 million worth of dead money for the Eagles. Instead, the Patriots released Sopoaga in the spring of 2014 and absorbed the dead money....
Under a “traditional” contract structure, the $4.75 million guaranteed (let’s use $4.8 million for the sake of round numbers) would have come in the form of a signing bonus, with $1.6 million counting against the cap each of the 3 seasons of the contract. If the player were to be traded or released prior to completion of the contract, the yet unaccounted for $1.6 million amounts would accelerate against the salary cap in the year of the transaction (or in the following year if the June 1st rule is applicable)....
In the years since the 2011 CBA was signed, a new type of contract structure has emerged. With Sopoaga’s contract being an example, this new contract structure typically features a fully guaranteed first year base salary, a first-year roster bonus, and full or partial guarantees on subsequent-year base salaries. Under this structure, the salary cap allocation of the guaranteed money – and the potential dead money associated with such guaranteed money – is spread over multiple years. But because the guaranteed money comes in the form of guaranteed base salary, it can be traded to another team, whereas prorated signing bonus guaranteed money and first-year roster bonus guaranteed money cannot be.
https://overthecap.com/trading-dead-...ring-contract/
They should seriously reexamine how they do contracts. I think it's them and the Packers that set things up with only doing bonuses. It basically played massive role in the Bell drama and might be part of ABs snot fit as well.
Thereust be benefits to it or they wouldn't be so stubborn about it.
The "benefit" they get is that they can have cap flexibility through restructures ... you can take a $15M non-guaranteed salary and spread the cap hit out over 3-4 years by converting it to a signing bonus. So in the first couple years of a 5-year, $60 million deal you can keep your cap hit to like $3 million. So you can use that temporary space to sign more players and then do the same trick with them to stay under the cap.
Whereas with a guaranteed contract, there's no incentive to convert the already-guaranteed money into a restructure.
Of course, the obvious drawback is that you don't actually "save" any money, just push it into future years, so on the above-mentioned contract, instead of a cap hit of 12-12-12-12-12, it's more like 3-3-17-17-20. But then that 17 doesn't really fit in to your plans, so what do you do? Extend the deal. Then you get another 3 but the 17s become 22s. So it becomes almost impossible to get that player off the team because you are eating an ever-increasing portion of the 22s if he departs for any reason including trade or retirement.
And of course, that's where most of your future cap space disappears to instead of signing new players. So in the end, for a modest gain in the immediate short term, you enter a perpetual juggling show where you are always adding more balls, and as soon as you get a Woodley or a Brown, or someone gets too old, or the cap doesn't increase as much as you thought, the whole thing gets messed up.
Basically I think the only reason we do this is because we are so deep into it that we can't stop, we're like borrowing from a loan shark to pay off other loan sharks. I have been advocating for us to use mostly flat contracts (guaranteed or otherwise) for a long time because of this. Really when we do all this funny-money stuff with restructures, the joke's on us, because we are essentually guaranteeing the contract anyway, only there's no way to get out of paying the whole amount without ruinous consequences. It really limits your options when it's bonus money that's already been paid - you are screwed. Since the players all want guaranteed money now, and the benefits of non-guaranteed-plus-restructure are pretty dubious, and the league is probably going to move toward somewhat guaranteed contracts* next CBA, it would make sense to go in that direction.
*I'm sure what will happen is that the players will demand fully guaranteed contracts, and since the league can't ever go without putting its own touch on things, or without unnecessarily complicating things with too many rules ... what they will probably come up with is some convoluted formula where a percentage of every contract is guaranteed across the board, and the percentage increases with the player's number of years in the league or something, and the players are bitching about something again in a couple years because it turned out to be stupid for some reason nobody thought of, like a loophole added as a poorly-thought out last-minute concession where the home team gets an advantage in the guaranteed money, and then it turns out to be abused in every contract and people hate it, because that's just the way things go when you add too many rules.
See you Space Cowboy ...
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