Jaguars Restructure Christian Kirk, Zay Jones, Brandon Scherff To Clear $26.14M in Cap Space

The Jaguars are officially cap compliant.

The Jacksonville Jaguars are officially under the 2023 salary cap. 

With the Jaguars needing to get under the cap by the start of the league year, general manager Trent Baalke and his front office have been hard at work clearing space, whether via extensions or restructures. 

The most significant of these moves came on Tuesday, with the Jaguars restructuring the deals of wide receivers Christian Kirk and Zay Jones and offensive guard Brandon Scherff -- creating $26.14 million in cap space. 

The Jaguars converted a total of $32.657M of base salary for WR Christian Kirk, WR Zay Jones and G Brandon Scherff into signing bonuses, creating a total of $26.14M in 2023 cap space, per source.

— Field Yates (@FieldYates) February 28, 2023

With the moves, the Jaguars now have close to $13 million in cap space -- a number that could nearly double if Shaquill Griffin is released. 

“Cash is more important than cap. There’s ways to maneuver the cap, and there’s ways to extend things into the future, but you’ve also got to be smart and diligent when you’re doing that," Jaguars general manager Trent Baalke said at the end of the 2022 season. 

"Again, we’re going to look at all of our options, we’re going to meet as a staff tomorrow, go through what our wish list is, then we’ll sit down with ownership, we’ll sit down with those that work on the cap and contracts, we’ll sit down with them, and we have been. We’ll have a final meeting with them to really get the ball rolling for the future.”

"First of all, we’re up against the cap a lot more than we were the previous two years. We feel really good about the nucleus of young players that we have on the team. I believe we’re the fifth or sixth youngest team in the National Football League right now. We have a lot of young players on their first contracts, a lot of players overall on their first contracts. As you transition into more guys that are on their second deals, it becomes more and more difficult to use free agency as a strong vehicle to improve your team, so we’ve got to look to the draft. We’ve got to look to developing the guys that are currently here and obviously retain as many of these guys as we can.”