Howie Roseman and Jake Rosenberg have gone back to their old bag of tricks with the Javon Hargrave contract.
Earlier this week, I took an in-depth look at the contract but the numbers have since changed. The Eagles added a couple dummy years to the end of this three-year deal to spread out the salary cap hit.
So this is still a three-year, $39 million deal, according to a league source, but the cap hits per year during those three seasons will be minimized.
By doing this, the Eagles will save $1.56 million in cap space in each of the next three seasons but will be left with dead cap money after the contract is up.
About a year ago, my colleague Reuben Frank did a deep dive on these kinds of contracts and how Roseman was using them. But here’s the gist: signing bonus money gets evenly spread across the length of the contract. So now, Hargrave’s $11.75M bonus will be spread out over five years instead of three.
Since there’s just $25.5 million guaranteed on the deal, the Eagles can still get out of the contract after two seasons but it would leave just over $7 million in dead space for 2022, saving just around $7 million in cap space.
But if Hargrave plays through the length of the three-year contract, the two dummy years (2023-24) void automatically if he’s on the roster 23 days before the 2023 league year begins. Once the years void, it would leave $4.7M in dead money (two years worth of prorated signing bonus) in 2023, assuming there hasn’t been an extension since then.
NFL
Hargrave’s base salary in 2020 is $1 million and his base salary for 2021-22 is $12.75 million. He has a workout bonus of $250,000 all three seasons.
Here’s an updated look at Hargrave’s cap hits by season. In parenthesis are what his cap hits would have been if this was a normal three-year deal:
2020: $3.6 million ($5.17M)
2021: $15.35 million ($16.92M)
2022: $15.35 million ($16.92M)
2023: $4.7 million ($0)
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