The NFLPA has announced 2020 performance-based pay distributions and third-year offensive lineman Andrew Wylie leads the way for the Kansas City Chiefs. He was also among the top earners in the league, receiving a total of $542,979 in performance-based pay for the 2020 NFL season. That number is in addition to the $750K base salary that Wylie already earned with the team last season.
The Chiefs first signed Wylie as a free agent toward the end of the 2017 season. He’s since carved out a role as a key depth player in Kansas City. He didn’t make his Chiefs debut until the start of the 2018 season and he ended up playing a lot that year because of a season-ending injury to Laurent Duvernay-Tardif. During his career, Wylie has appeared in 41 games while starting 35 for Kansas City. This past season he started a career-high of 14 games.
Wylie’s amount of playing time in 2020 is a big reason that he earned the most performance-based pay among Chiefs players. It’s not simply the players who perform the best as the name of the system would suggest. Typically, players with a lower salary and larger playtime are the ones that profit most from the league’s performance-based pay system. He played a total of 972 offensive snaps during the regular season, a career-high for Wylie. The NFLPA credited him with 92% of the team’s playtime in 2020.
The NFL and NFLPA agreed to defer the performance-based payouts this year according to NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo. He says it’s part of the agreement the two made on the salary-cap shortfall due to COVID-19. That means performance-based pay for 2020 will be paid out by the league at a later date. In total, Kansas City will pay its players an extra $8.5 million due to performance-based pay from the 2020 NFL season.