By John Sigler | Saints Wire
The New Orleans Saints are used to getting creative in their efforts to work around the NFL salary cap, often backloading contracts and relying on crafty salary cap structure to max out their resources every year. However, there’s a chance that one of their favorite tricks won’t be available in the 2020 offseason, unless the league and the NFL Players Association are able to settle on a new collective bargaining agreement.
As recently pointed out by ESPN’s Dan Graziano, “Article 13, Section 7 of the CBA mandates that ‘no player contract extending into a season beyond the Final League Year may provide for an annual increase in salary … of more than 30 percent of the salary provided for in the Final League Year, per year, either in the season after the Final League Year or in any subsequent season covered by the Player Contract.’”
In translation: teams are not allowed to sign players to contracts with a raise of more than 30% in 2020 during subsequent years, though this doesn’t include prorated signing bonuses. According to Over the Cap’s Jason Fitzgerald, this is designed to stop teams from taking an unfair advantage of a potentially uncapped season.
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