Due to numerous contract restructurings by general manager Brian Gutekunst over the past several years, the Green Bay Packers will be on the hook for nearly $17 million in dead money next season. Ted Thompson must be rolling over in his grave.
Thompson, who spent over a decade as the Packers general manager and led the team to its last Super Bowl in 2010, despised having dead money on the salary cap. That’s why he rarely signed expensive free agents and often let go of still-productive veteran players rather than pay them. Thompson took plenty of heat when he cut the cord with the likes of guards Josh Sitton and T.J. Lang, center Scott Wells, wide receiver Greg Jennings, edge rusher Julius Peppers and cornerback Charles Woodson, but that kept dead money totals among the lowest in the league during his long tenure.
The Packers averaged $5.5M in dead money from 2011 through 2017. That number has tripled since Gutekunst was hired.
Under Thompson, only three players had dead money of over $2M, and two were due to health issues. All-Pro safety Nick Collins ($2.3M) was forced to retire due to a neck injury in 2012, and Pro Bowl cornerback Sam Shields ($3.1) was released in 2017 after team doctors refused to clear him following a series of concussions. As for tight end Martellus Bennett ($3.1M), there’s absolutely no excuse. The ex-Giant, Cowboy, Bear, and Patriot was just a horrible signing. He played only seven ineffectual games for the Packers in 2017 but stayed on the salary cap for $3.1M in 2018 and $4.3M in 2019.
Under Gutekunst, six players have had dead money of over $2M in just the past three years. Edge rusher Za’Darius Smith ($11.4M) and tackle Billy Turner ($5.8M) were cut last spring with a year remaining on the deals they signed in 2019.
The other four players with dead money of over $2M are tight end Jimmy Graham ($3.7M), who was released in 2020 with a year left on the contract he signed as a free agent, strong safety Adrian Amos ($7.9M), and defensive lineman Dean Lowry ($3M). The latter two are scheduled to become free agents next month. Their deals, along with the one signed by cornerback Kevin King ($3M) in 2021, included void years, which the Packers have started using frequently lately.
Void years are dummy seasons added to the end of the contract. A player’s signing bonus is pro-rated over all the remaining years of a deal, so by adding years; a team can spread out the cap hit over more seasons. Of course, this is only a short-term fix, and as is the case with Amos and Lowry, the bill will eventually have to be paid. That’ll be the case in the future with running back Aaron Jones, quarterback Aaron Rodgers, nose tackle Kenny Clark, cornerback Jaire Alexander, and edge rusher Preston Smith, who all had void years added to their deals as a way to create cap space.
There’s no denying the Packers’ cap was in much better shape under Thompson, whose philosophy was to move on from an older player a year too early rather than a year too late. To be fair, he didn’t have to deal with COVID, which caused the salary cap to decrease for the first time in 2021 and created some level of discomfort for every single GM in the league. That said, nobody forced Gutekunst to extend Rodgers with multiple years left on his contract in 2018 and then do it again to the tune of $110M in guaranteed money in 2022. Nor was a gun held to his head when he gave huge extensions to Jones, Smith, and tackle David Bakhtiari – a trio of older players whose future dead money will be very unsightly.
Of course, nobody would care about dead money if the Packers won the Super Bowl in any of their 13-win seasons (2019 to 2021). Just ask fans of the LA Rams. Their roster is as big a mess as their cap due to signing and extending numerous highly-paid vets, but they took home the Lombardi Trophy in 2021. Gutekunst used a similar strategy; unfortunately, all he’ll have to show for it is a bunch of former Packers taking up a lot of cap space while suiting up for other teams come September.
To paraphrase Andrew Brandt, who negotiated deals for the Packers from 1999 through 2008, there’s nothing creative about restructuring contracts and adding void years. Being creative is not having to restructure contracts and add void years.
in terms of communicating and comparing dead cap money from one era to another, i think it would be more informative to use percent of cap instead of dollar amounts. that said, the general premise that the Thompson era was more fiscally conservative than the Gutekunst era is certainly true.
part of the differences in spending may be that the Gutekunst era includes/is currently weathering a “last dance, all-in, end of the Aaron Rodgers’-era Packers”. regardless of GM, bigger spending would naturally be part of this reality. also, there was a pandemic season and corresponding salary cap hit which the Thompson-era front office did not have to endure and the Gutekunst-era front office could not have foreseen.
finally, there are new realities in modern salary cap projections which favor an overall increase in spending and reduce organizational incentives to be fiscally conservative.
in short, it is not yet clear to me that there is a radical difference in the fiscal philosophies of Gutekunst v. Thompson. i am willing to withhold judgement for a few years before drawing conclusions.
all that said, i think Andrew Brandt is very much worth listening to.
Covid threw a wrench in just about everything, including salary caps.
I’m still not entirely sure what Gute’s overall plan is. Kicking the can down the road so we can go .500 multiple seasons in a row doesn’t seem to make any sense. If Love can’t play then we’ve got a roster with no QB and salary cap problems for the foreseeable future.
The poll wasn’t working for me, but it’s kinda fun to debate the merits of Z, Preston and Amos as free agent signees. Love Campbell, but I can’t put him in the same class just yet. Credit to Gute for going 4/4 in that free agency splurge a few years back. My vote is for Amos, who wasn’t as flashy as Z but gave us really high quality play for multiple years. Preston wasn’t consistent enough to be the “best” and players that sign with Minnesota are disqualified.
For some reason, the poll isn’t working in the mobile version of the site, but it should be OK in the desktop version.