Termination Pay

[Ulrich82]

I found this article written about how termination pay works in the NFL. I'm posting it here because there has been some discussion in the past offseasons about guaranteed contracts. It is often reported that the salary for any veteran on the week 1 roster is fully guaranteed for the season. As reported here (http://overthecap.com/veteran-players-a ... ation-pay/), that isn't exactly the case.

Any veteran is allowed to claim termination equal to his season's salary ONCE in his career. There is also an additional in-season termination pay, but it is only 25% of the player's salary.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure how we would/could use this information, but it helps clear up the issue of guarantees in NFL veteran contracts.

[Goodell]

I found this article written about how termination pay works in the NFL. I'm posting it here because there has been some discussion in the past offseasons about guaranteed contracts. It is often reported that the salary for any veteran on the week 1 roster is fully guaranteed for the season. As reported here (http://overthecap.com/veteran-players-a ... ation-pay/), that isn't exactly the case.

Any veteran is allowed to claim termination equal to his season's salary ONCE in his career. There is also an additional in-season termination pay, but it is only 25% of the player's salary.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure how we would/could use this information, but it helps clear up the issue of guarantees in NFL veteran contracts.

Great to find resources like that, thanks.

I'll have to double-check, but I believe much of what is described is how it also works here as implemented last year. Veterans on the team for Week 1 have their contracts guaranteed the year (so their full salary goes against the cap even if cut the next week). However, guys signed to play in Week 2 or beyond and cut before the end of the year would only have a partial salary for the number of weeks played.

That one-time in a career thing came up at the time, I believe, and some mentioned the complexity of adding that. Every player would have to have that tracked for their entire career, as well as that option explained to the GM whether it applied to them or not individually for each player being different on their roster. Then there's the fairness and effort of when do we start tracking? Last year was the first time we started that. It's possible maybe to go through the transaction logs and get a list of all impacted players and add that to their career data so if they had their full-termination pay last year any future team didn't have to pay it, but possibly some work into going back and developing that list of impacted players to modify their records and programming so didn't have to pay full contract if ever cut after week 1 in the future seasons. Such transactions might have also been marked in the cap hits logs in a way that might allow me to get that list easier, I'll have to see.

It's something to think about and I'll try to see how difficult it would be to get the applicable players marked from last year, but while it's a great thing to point out it might be one of those small details that's more work to implement than beneficial overall. Players who get cut repeatedly after week 1 arguably might be lower-salary lower-demand types also where whether a smaller salary (ex. 535K) counted in full each time they were cut in their careers after week 1 or just the first time they were cut after week 1 and partially after, may not be a big factor for the work involved.

But I'm not sure yet of the work needed to track past impacted players or allow for that additional transaction change in the future. I'll try to check into that soon.