Kenny Golladay's Contract Ranked Among Top-10 Worst in League

Receiver Kenny Golladay hasn't come close to delivering the return on investment the Giants were looking for when they signed him as an unrestricted free agent.

The four-year, $72 million deal that the New York Giants signed receiver Kenny Golladay to in the 2021 off-season ranks as the fifth-worst (among ten) as ranked by Pro Football Network's Dallas Robinson, who wrote of the ranking:

Injuries limited Golladay to just five games in his final season with the Lions, but the Giants still opted to give him a four-year, $72 million pact with $28 million guaranteed. In 14 games a year ago, Golladay managed just 37 catches for 521 scoreless yards — not exactly what you’d expect from a receiver making $18 million/year.

Things have only gotten worse this year. New York is in desperate need of wideouts, but they’ve still kept Golladay off the field. He’s appeared in six games and caught four passes for 51 yards. Big Blue will almost assuredly cut Golladay in the spring, and a post-June 1 designation seems likely.

At the time of his signing, the Giants hoped that Golladay would be able to work wonders for Daniel Jones's development.

The problem with the signing is that then-general manager Dave Gettleman went against a tried and true philosophy of avoiding players coming off a significant injury during that free agency signing period. 

He brought in Golladay, who was coming off a season-ending hip ailment, with little to no concern of a reoccurrence of other issues rather than look to draft a tallish receiver who would spend four years on a more affordable rookie deal.

Unfortunately for the Giants and Gettleman, Golladay didn't deliver due in part to assorted injuries that kept popping up and which may have been related to his prior issue and partially due to Golladay's poor attempts at hiding his displeasure over then-offensive coordinator Jason Garrett's system.

Very little has changed this year. Golladay missed time due to a knee sprain, but even before that, he wasn't bringing all that much to the offense, looking like a far cry from being the No. 1 receiver the Giants thought they were getting.

Golladay has caught four of ten targets this year for 51 yards and still has yet to record a touchdown as a Giant. He has two dropped balls and is zero for two in contested catches, an area that was supposedly his strength.

To make matters worse, he has the highest cap hit on the team at $21.5 million, of which $17.5 million is guaranteed this year. If that's not bad enough, he's due another $4.5 million in guaranteed money next year, making it all but certain that when the Giants do lop that contract off their books, Golladay will be a post-June 1 designation so the Giants can optimize the savings ($13.5 million versus $6.7 million).

Current Giants general manager Joe Schoen has thus far been able to avoid having to touch Golladay's contract for additional cap space to get him through the season. Still, there might come a time in the final weeks when he might have no choice but to restructure the deal just to finish out 2022. The Giants currently have $2.588 million of cap space left, but the constant stream of injuries will significantly stress that amount.

The good news is that the Giants' salary cap should be in much better shape next year and that the savings from Golladay's contract, assuming again that it's a post-June 1 transaction, should be more than enough to pay for the incoming rookie draft class. But there's little question that the contract has been an albatross that has hamstrung the Giants in more ways than one, given the return they've gotten from Golladay.

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