As they get closer to the 2024 league season on Wednesday, the Buffalo Bills are still clearing cap space. According to ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler, the most recent action was renegotiating tight end Dawson Knox’s contract.
According to a source, tight end Dawson Knox and the Bills have hammered out a revised deal that would reduce Knox’s $14.4 million cap cost this season. More room is required for Buffalo.
I take the word “reworked” in the quote to mean that Knox’s compensation has been reduced rather than a traditional reorganization. Knox must approve a wage reduction of this kind but would not have been required to consent to a reorganization.
One example of these reworkings occurred last week when the Bills reduced Von Miller’s compensation and included numerous incentives to help him recoup the money in the event that he had a successful season. Similar to Miller, Knox is recovering from an injury, so many of those incentives may be fair and will not be subject to the 2024 salary cap.
Likely To Be Earned (LTBE) and Not Likely To Be Earned (NLTBE) are the two categories into which the CBA divides incentives. While NLTBE incentives weren’t fulfilled the previous season, the athlete met the LTBE incentives as standards last year. It is not subject to the current year salary cap if it is NLTBE. The player’s cap commitment for the next year is increased if they meet the standard.
This week, Knox had a $5 million roster bonus that was fully guaranteed, in addition to a $3.58 million salary guarantee. An additional $1.33 million was scheduled to be completely guaranteed later this week. Although his dead cap cost of more than $20 million meant he would be on the roster, his cap hit was only supposed to be $14.3 million.
I anticipated that the Bills would at the very least rework the agreement to move the guaranteed money into later cap years. The Fowler tweet casts suspicion on the 2024 and beyond pay in its entirety.
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