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Drew Brees intends to play in the 2020 NFL season, which is great news for the New Orleans Saints. Starting Brees at quarterback presents their best opportunity to win another Super Bowl title, but getting both parties to the negotiating table is the easy part. Now that both sides are interested in keeping this relationship together, they must hammer out a contract extension.
It’s gone easier in past years, thanks to the rising salary cap and Brees’ willingness to take team-friendly contracts. His last extension was a two-year, $50 million deal that paid out nearly $10 million below the price Brees could command on the open market; six other passers currently make $30 million or more per year, and the best quarterbacks are earning $35 million each season they suit up. Brees accepted a lower rate to help out the team, but it actually runs deeper than that.
In addition to a depressed salary, Brees also structured his contracts to run year-to-year, rather than tying the Saints to him over four or five years. That acknowledged the possibility that he could fall off a cliff at any time, much like other aging passers did before him (see: Brett Favre and Peyton Manning). While Brees will leave a sizable dead money hit behind once he retires, it won’t set the Saints back for a decade.
But there’s the rub, and the largest hurdle the Saints must overcome in agreeing to a new contract with Brees. Their past contract structures (and subsequent restructures) resulted in a base salary cap hit of $15.9 million in 2020, which reportedly can’t be decreased. That means any new money the Saints guarantee for him — through his 2020 base salary or a signing bonus — will be added on top of that.
In previous years, the Saints could spread out the damage against the salary cap with automatically voided years and prorated signing bonuses. But that’s not an option without a new, ratified Collective Bargaining Agreement. Any future bonuses written into contracts must be accounted for in 2020 this year, which removes some of the Saints’ favorite tools from the toolbox.
So what will Brees’ new contract extension look like? We’ll keep it simple and anticipate an updated model of his last contract, signed back in 2018. That deal paid out $25 million per year, which was 14% of the salary cap at the time. Assuming Brees makes the same demand in 2020, that would be worth about $28 million per season. 54% of that contract was guaranteed at the time, so we’ll suggest the same percentage this time around.
Those qualifiers in mind, here’s what we came up with: two years, $56 million, with $30.24 million in guarantees. That’s a 2020 salary cap hit of $31.02 million, which would require even more creative accounting by the Saints. Four other quarterbacks are currently counting for $30 million or more against the 2020 salary cap:
- Jared Goff, Los Angeles Rams: $36,042,682
- Ben Roethlisberger, Pittsburgh Steelers: $33,500,000
- Russell Wilson, Seattle Seahawks: $31,000,000
- Kirk Cousins, Minnesota Vikings: $31,000,000
Maybe they’ll luck out and Brees will accept an even lower salary than last time, closer to $20 million per year. Whatever the case, this is something the Saints have been planning for, and they’ll be ready to pay up when the time comes.
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