The Ben Roethlisberger contract adjustment came and went this week without much fanfare. And I don’t expect many of you to be enthralled with what really just amounts to a whole lot of math.
But in case you are, here’s what the Steelers did: They took Roethlisberger’s $15 million roster bonus and $4 million base salary for 2021, ripped it up and did a new “five-year” deal, which has a $12.925 million signing bonus and $1.075 million base salary, with four voidable (read: fake) years that allow the team to move $10.34 million of Big Ben’s cap charge from 2021 to 2022. It lowered his overall cap hit from $40 million to $25.91 million.
A quarterback restructuring his contract to help his team out in March is nothing new.
A quarterback taking a straight-up pay cut to do it .
Look back at those numbers again. It’s right there. Roethlisberger is short $5 million.
This isn’t a column about the Steelers’ salary cap situation, what Roethlisberger’s got left in the tank or why $14 million (rather $19 million) made the most sense for everyone involved. It’s more so about the window the move gave us all into what’s going to take place in the NFL over the next month or so.
Ever since COVID-19 shut our country down almost exactly a year ago, and just a couple weeks after the NFL and NFLPA completed their new CBA, everyone had an idea this week was coming. The NFL was going to lose revenue as a result of the pandemic, with the stands largely empty, and that was going to affect salary caps. And veteran players under contracts built for a constantly rising cap were going to feel the brunt of it.
In essence, what was once a two-lane highway, that became a three-lane highway, then a four-lane highway and a five-lane highway, is going back down to four lanes with minimal notice. For some teams, it means having to reckon with a few bottlenecks on the roster. For others, there’s a 10-car pileup looming and advance plans are being formulated to dig through the rubble. For a precious few, there’s open, if uncertain, road ahead.
And in the coming days, there are a lot of teams playing the role of the Steelers in the example above, with the hope players might be willing to pull a Roethlisberger.
Here we’re going to do our best to map all of that for you.
