The Bengals Restructure Helps Keep Core Players Together
John Sheeran discusses the Cincinnati Bengals restructuring Joe Burrow's contract and details how it could help the team retain players like DJ Turner, Dax Hill and Myles Murphy.
Video Transcript
The Bengals finally did that thing with Joe Burrow.
They did it slightly different and earlier than I expected them to, and some of his most important teammates are about to reap the benefits.
I'm John Scheer of A to Z Sports Cincinnati.
This is A to Z Sports Cincinnati, covering your Cincinnati Bengals throughout the 2026 off-season.
Guys, we've talked about the Bengals potentially restructuring Joe Burrow's contract for the better part of the last, I don't know, 18 months or so.
Joe Burrow, of course, signed a five-year, $275 million contract extension in September of 2023.
At the time, it made him the highest paid player in NFL history, and it was also the very first contract the Bengals ever signed that include future guaranteed salaries.
It's the exact kind of contract that you see every single year by multiple NFL teams get altered with, get restructured.
And despite the Bengals, you know, releasing players before the expiration of their contracts, having players take pay cuts, and having, quote-unquote, reworked contracts, the Bengals have never actually restructured any contract because restructuring a contract means that you're not cutting or slashing any salary or pay from that deal.
You're just essentially moving money around in the sense of accounting.
And the reason why I've said I don't expect the Bengals to ever really do that is because restructuring, again, it moves cap dollars into the future.
It sacrifices future cap space, and that is exactly against what the Bengals stand for.
Right at the end of the Bengals' first OTA practice of the week, it was reported by NFL insiders, both Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport, that the Bengals have officially restructured the contract of Joe Burrow, and it will save them $10 million in salary cap space in 2026.
Now, Rapoport also included this little nugget that this is in part due to the fact that the Bengals need cash to pay Dexter Lawrence, but don't listen to that.
That's not true.
And I'm not taking a dig at Rapoport here, but that framing is just incorrect.
The Bengals had enough cash to pay Dexter Lawrence, and they had enough cash to have him on the books this year.
That contract is already signed.
They had enough cap space to fit Dexter Lawrence.
This gives them more cap space to do more things.
But where does that cap space come from?
Because again, a restructure is not the same thing as a pay cut, which the Bengals had for Geno Stone, Cordell Volsen, Zach Moss, Joe Mixon a handful of years back.
Those were straight up slashing their base salaries to create cap space because it was a reflection of who the Bengals believed those players to be at the time.
This is not the Bengals cutting Joe Burrow's pay.
This is just moving some money around in terms of when it pops up on the salary cap.
Essentially, that $10 million in space is created by taking about $12.5 million out of Joe Burrow's base salary for the 2026 season, which was originally gonna be about $25 million.
You're taking half of that base salary, about 12 and a half million, and you're putting that money into a bonus that can now be prorated for five years.
As you can tell with this chart below me, courtesy of overthecap.com, Joe Burrow's base salary for this year is now $12.75 million.
It was, again, originally $25.25 million.
So $12.5 million got taken out of his base salary.
It's still gonna find his bank account by the end of this year at some point, but that 12 and a half million is now included in the signing bonus column of this chart as well, and it's, again, being prorated over the next five years.
Joe Burrow's under contract for four more years, but there is a void year at the end of his contract, which is where bonus money can be prorated and then put onto the books for the 2030 salary cap.
So you have $12.5 million over five years.
You do some simple math, 12 and a half divided by five, that's 2.5.
So that $12.5 million divided by five, that's $2.5 million that gets put onto the cap each year for the next five years.
You take that $12.5 million away, and then you put 10 million on the next four years of the salary cap.
So that's 2.5 for 2027, 2.5 for 2028, et cetera, et cetera, which then leaves 2.5 that gets put onto the 2026 salary cap.
So it went from 12.5 down to 2.5, and that is where you get a difference of 10 million in savings.
All that you have to think about here is that you're getting a $12.5 million cap hit, and you're spreading it out over five years because according to the collective bargaining agreement, that's how long you can prorate signing bonus money.
And again, I cannot reiterate this enough.
This is not money that is being taken away from Joe Burrow.
This is not money that the Bengals are pocketing for themselves.
This is simply money that, from an accounting perspective, can be spread out over the next five years, which is how they save cap space in the current moment.
They save 10 million in salary cap space for 2026, but they're sacrificing $2.5 million in salary cap space in 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030.
The amount of cash that Joe Burrow makes this year is the exact same, but his salary cap hit dropped from 47.994 million to 37.994 million.
So why did the Bengals do this?
I think a lot of people have pointed to the fact that this gives them money to sign a guy like Bobby Wagner or a Joey Bosa or just some notable veteran that can help them out on defense.
It could be a slot cornerback, it could be a linebacker, it could be any number of positions, right?
They have been known to make these late training camp and preseason additions in recent years.
Obviously, Noah Fan and Don Risner come to mind from last year.
But I think the main reason why the Bengals did this is to, number one, get back to their typical off-season salary cap space figure of about 16, $17 million.
The Bengals always like going into a season with approximately $10 million in salary cap space that they can then roll over into the next year, which gives them more salary cap space for the future.
And by going from about 7 million salary cap space to 16, 17 million, that also gives them more flexibility and more room to pay guys on their own team, like DJ Turner.
I think DJ Turner is the highest priority in terms of who the Bengals want to extend before the regular season begins because he's probably gonna get the largest contract of any guys who are also eligible for extensions.
That includes fellow cornerback Dax Hill, pass rusher Miles Murphy, and running back Chase Brown.
Turner has the best argument for getting the largest contract out of those four players, and therefore, I think he's the highest priority here.
And when the Bengals were just at $7 million in cap space, I was thinking, "How are they going to fit an extension for Turner when odds are that extension is going to balloon his current cap hit?"
Because that's what the Bengals typically do in these negotiations.
Because they don't offer future guaranteed salaries, they have to incentivize a lot of upfront money in the, in the form of, like, a roster bonus or an inflated base salary.
So in order to pay DJ Turner the average annual value that he's probably likely going to accept, which is gonna be in the range of 20 million or maybe even more, he's probably gonna have a larger cap hit than about the $3.6 million figure that he currently has.
And that's going to eat into the Bengals' current salary cap space.
So if the Bengals didn't have this additional cap space that they now have, thanks to Joe Burrow's contract restructure, I think it would've been harder for them to extend DJ Turner without altering their negotiation tactics and them having to give up future guarantees, which honestly, they should be doing, but I think this gives them the opportunity to avoid doing that.A Miles Murphy extension is also definitely on the table, I think because the fact that they declined his fifth-year option, that only accelerates the timeline, and his value's gonna be probably somewhere between that 14 to $15 million range when it's all said and done.
So this gives them more space to do that as well.
And I also wanna own up to me being wrong here.
I didn't think the Bengals were actually going to restructure Burrow's contract, at least not this year, because if they had just gone a traditional full-blown restructure, the Bengals would have saved about $19 million in salary cap space by converting as much of Burrow's total cash that he gets this year into a signing bonus.
That's how much money they could have saved.
But at the same time, it also would have sacrificed even more salary cap space in the future, which is why I didn't think that they were going to do it.
I personally didn't consider them having just a partial restructure, right?
Because only half of Burrow's base salary is being converted into a bonus that he's going to get this year.
Credit to the Bengals, I did not expect them to do that.
And I think that the way that they did it, in reality, it makes total sense to do it right now because you're barely sacrificing any future salary cap space, but you're giving yourself enough flexibility to make the moves on your own roster that you need to make before the season begins.
If restructuring Burrow's contract allows them to fit in extensions for both DJ Turner, Miles Murphy, and then maybe one of Dax Hill or Chase Brown, this off-season is even more of a resounding success than it already was.
And it sets precedent that the Bengals are willing to do something like this going forward.
Obviously, the larger the contract, the more impact of a restructure there's going to be, but you could potentially restructure Ja'Marr Chase's contract next year, open yourself up for more salary cap space.
Hell, you can even restructure Burrow's contract again next year, or maybe you have, you know, extension talks because his guaranteed salary's gonna expire after 2027.
You're still gonna have some big decisions that you need to make in future off-seasons, and now it seems like this lever has finally been unlocked by the Bengals front office.
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