Packer Central

Accounting Handles 30 Percent of Packers’ Cap Problem

The Packers converted David Bakhtiari’s roster bonus into signing bonus to create $8.304 million of salary-cap relief.

Bill Huber

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers dug themselves out of almost one-third of their salary-cap hole this week by restructuring All-Pro left tackle David Bakhtiari’s contract.

In nothing more than an accounting move, the Packers converted Bakhtiari’s $11.072 roster bonus into signing bonus, according to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport. By doing so, that money was spread over the 2021 through 2024 salary caps and created $8.304 million of cap space for 2021 at the expense of adding $2.768 million to his already-lofty cap charges in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Just like that, the Packers went from about $28.19 million over the cap to $19.89 million over the cap, according to OverTheCap.com. That took care of 29.4 percent of the deficit.

Regardless of the speculation over the signing of former All-Pro and Wisconsin native J.J. Watt, it was a necessary move to get beneath the salary cap for the start of the league-year on March 17.

Due to COVID-19 and its bite out of the league’s giant economic pie, the cap is expected to fall from $198.2 million in 2019 to perhaps $180.5 million in 2020. It’s not just the potential decrease of $17.7 million, it’s that it’s not the annual increase of $10-plus million that teams had become accustomed to building into their football budgets.

A restructured contract for MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers, which would turn roster bonus and salary into signing bonus to decrease his $37.2 million cap hit, and a contract extension for receiver Davante Adams, which would reduce the $16.8 million cap hit stemming from a $12.25 million base salary, could take care of most of the heavy lifting to get to the cap.

Bakhtiari is coming off an All-Pro season despite missing the end of the year with a torn ACL. Pro Football Focus charged him with one sack and nine total pressures compared to two sacks and 37 total pressures in 2019. For more of an apples-to-apples comparison, Bakhtiari allowed a pressure on 2.02 percent of passing plays this season compared to 4.86 percent last year.

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Bill Huber
BILL HUBER

Bill Huber, who has covered the Green Bay Packers since 2008, is the publisher of Packers On SI, a Sports Illustrated channel. E-mail: packwriter2002@yahoo.com History: Huber took over Packer Central in August 2019. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillHuberNFL Background: Huber graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he played on the football team, in 1995. He worked in newspapers in Reedsburg, Wisconsin Dells and Shawano before working at The Green Bay News-Chronicle and Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1998 through 2008. With The News-Chronicle, he won several awards for his commentaries and page design. In 2008, he took over as editor of Packer Report Magazine, which was founded by Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, and PackerReport.com. In 2019, he took over the new Sports Illustrated site Packer Central, which he has grown into one of the largest sites in the Sports Illustrated Media Group.

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