Buffalo Bills center Mitch Morse is helping his team out.
According to NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport on Tuesday, the offensive lineman has restructured his contract with the Bills. In doing so, the report states it saves the team nearly $2 million.
Rapoport went on to clarify that the 28-year-old “can earn back some” of that money in his reworked deal. That likely means the move was made to change some of his dollars from his base salary to incentive bonuses. Such a move would give the team extra salary cap space.
As of now, we only know the 2021 salary cap will go down. Last season, the cap was at $198.2M, and next year, due to COVID-19 keeping fans out of games, we only know it won’t go lower than $180M… that final number could reportedly sit somewhere in the $180-185M range.
Per Spotrac, if the cap is set at $185M, the Bills have $4.6M in cap space currently. Even with Morse’s restructure, Buffalo general manager Brandon Beane likely has some more work to do in order to help create more cap space as free agency approaches on March 17.
Morse currently has two years left on his deal.
The Bills did have another option with Morse: Outright cutting him. That would have saved the team $5M against the cap, but evidently the two sides instead decided to meet in the middle.
In 2020, Morse interestingly was benched for one game and at the time Buffalo head coach Sean McDermott said it was not because Morse suffered another concussion prior to that. The coach also then said it was not performance based. So what was it?
At his end of season press conference, Beane shed a little bit more light on the situation and did say that sitting Morse had to do with the injury situation and giving him an extra week. That game Morse sat out was the Cardinals loss.
Overall, Pro Football Focus ranked Morse a 65.8 grade in 2020. That was the analytics outlet’s 21st ranked center in the league last year.
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