re: Restructuring Carr's contract.....

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Or, and bear with me, we can go the sane f*cking route and just bite the bullet for the next year or two while we look to rebuild for the future instead of perpetually f*cking living in salary cap f*cking hell as a 4-7 win team.

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You do realize we have to get under the salary cap right? If you have a way to do that without restructuring Carr or Davis or Cam or Taysom or Mathieu, then I’m all ears.

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However, here’s the kicker. If they restructure his contract this year, his dead money contract hit next year will be $69 million.

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There are so many ways to skin the cat here, but I think that number would be what his cap hit will be if they don't touch the 2026 figure (pay him his $50M salary plus the deferred bonuses)

Right now, per OTC, his deal is as followed:
2025: $30M salary, $11.5M deferred bonus, $10M guaranteed roster bonus
2026: $50M salary, $11.5M deferred bonus
2027: $17.2M deferred bonuses (void years)

If they convert $28M of his 2025 salary to a bonus, and give him a $2M salary for 2025; this all changes to:
2025: $2M salary, $17M deferred bonus, $10M guaranteed roster bonus
2026: $50M salary, $17M deferred bonus
2027: $34M deferred bonuses (void years)

His current 2026 cap hit is $61.5M. Based on the suggested restructure, his 2026 cap hit jumps to $67M. However, if cut his dead money is $45.5M - which would be $16M less that what is currently on the books.

Not the ideal situation, but also not a $69M dead money hit the taking heads were apparently throwing out

Restructure can't push it into 2028. The fact that there is no salary in 2027 means anything pushed past 2026 will hit the books in 2027. If you want to see something pushed to 2028, there needs to be an extension. Which also means adding another $30+M in salary in 2027...and I am sure Carr & his agent will demand more guarantees knowing it's also a move to eventually cut him

i think an extension would only be done if performance warranted it.

This is what dummy years are for. If you want to extend him without actually giving him new money you just add the dummy years while converting his base salary.

Then we have until the first dummy year to decide if we want to give him an actual extension or let the dead money hit the books that year.

As for demanding more money, we currently hold the leverage since he is due a big bonus if not cut, so he would not refuse a restructure with dummy years if it gets him that bonus.

The expectation is he will either be cut before that date (March 17th iirc), or get an "extension" with dummy years to fully push out his converted base over a full 5 years (the max years allowed).

Then we will repeat this process the following year if he was not cut, but basically all we are doing is juggling the money he would be paid anyway. This isn't creating any new money on the cap, and while people freak out over these high dead money amounts, they completely forget this is how we get a player with a $30 mil salary for only $2 mil for a year instead.

If people truly grasped the concept of kicking the can and realized the money we are saving now allows us to do all the things we do now, and realize the dead money later isn't some surprise but a planned extension date on the money that was due, then they wouldn't be freaking out and crying about how screwed we are.

And to make this clear I'll put it in a separate post, this applies to EVERY player we have done this with, and not specific to the current Carr situation.

Literally the only 2 times we got "screwed" by this way of doing things was in 2012 after we traded Graham and had our roster "set" right against the cap, then Junior Galette goes and acts an arse and we cut him and messed up the balance of things we had planned for 2012 and 2013 (since his hit was spread over those 2 years once cut), and then the season where the cap went down (iirc, or at least not significantly up) instead of up like expected, which was an extreme outlier.

But both times we adjusted and still made things happen.

Now if people want to complain who we are spending money on, that's another argument entirely. As for how we spend the money, the system has worked for over 20 years now, with only those 2 hiccups. People need to learn to stop freaking out because all of this has been thought about and planned around.

He has a bonus due on the 17th this month that makes that a bad idea, although (if the rule still exists) you can designate him as one of your two post June 1st cuts that you cut early.

It doesn't save you the money now, but come Jine 1st it would act as a cut on that date, and avoid the bonus he is about to be due.

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A full restructure of Carr's contract would free up $30.9 million in 2025 but push $7.7 million into 2026, giving him a 2026 cap figure of $69 million. That means the Saints will have to make a decision about Carr's contract again next offseason.

The downside of restructuring Carr's contract is that releasing him next year will have a bigger impact on the salary cap. A full restructure would add $7.7 million to each year of the deal, and if the Saints released him in 2026, they would either face about $42.4 million in dead money charges or $19.2 million as a post-June 1 cut, while still having to carry his salary through the offseason.

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per ESPN

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Which is why he'll get an extension, not just a restructure

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If he’s cut next year it still accelerates all that dead money

It wasn't a complete catastrophe. They paid mid range money for a mid range QB. I'm not sure what people were expecting. Drew Brees 2.0 is not walking through the door.