The bill always comes due.
On Monday, several Buffalo Bills starters from the 2023 NFL season saw their contracts void. As such, One Bills Drive saw those dead-cap charges officially hit the books for the 2024 NFL season.
To be clear, these contracts were specifically designed to void, so none of this is surprising.
Instead of extending the contracts of edge rusher Leonard Floyd, safety Micah Hyde, plus defensive tackles DaQuan Jones and Tim Settle, general manager Brandon Beane and the Bills allowed them to expire.
Here is the list of players and their salary cap charges whose contracts void today. These charges now become dead money pic.twitter.com/IFwTawMp4V
— Jason_OTC (@Jason_OTC) February 19, 2024
What exactly is a void year in terms of an NFL contract?
Void-year contracts have become more common since the end of the 2020 NFL season, when for the first time in a decade the salary cap actually decreased — giving general managers and all 32 teams less money to work with year over year. Void years are “dummy seasons” teams add to the end of a player’s contract, where teams leverage a player’s signing bonus over more years than are currently left on that player’s deal (allowing it to be spread out up to five years). At the point when a player approaches the void year(s) of their current contract and they aren’t re-signed to a new deal with the team, their pro-rated years of signing bonus kicks in to the current year’s cap.
Let’s revisit the situation with Micah Hyde from March of 2022, when the Bills restructured Hyde’s contract to spread out his salary cap hit over multiple seasons. I’ll summarize our work from that article, but click through to the original work for more information.
In March of 2022, Hyde had only two years left on his current deal, and Beane wanted to leverage the maximum amount of salary cap relief. To do so, three void years were added to Hyde’s deal, turning his contract into a five-year deal. By restructuring Hyde’s deal in 2022, the Bills took money already allocated on their books in roster bonus and base salary and reallocated it.
In these negotiations, both parties mutually benefit: Hyde received most of his 2022 money up front, while the team was able to clear cap space in the 2022 season. It’s important to note that these restructures are only done with players that the team knows will be on the roster during the upcoming season (and often more). Additionally, players whose contracts already have guaranteed money are often given this type of a restructure. Why? With money that’s already guaranteed, it simply accelerates the clock on payment.
What happens next for the Buffalo Bills?
What does this mean for the Bills and each of these four players? Again, it locks in those numbers — a total of $10,967,584 — to the team’s books as dead cap for the upcoming season.
That total broken down by player is as follows:
- Floyd — $4,376,250
- Hyde — $3,408,000
- Jones — $1,833,334
- Settle — $1,350,000
The Bills theoretically could have extended one of these players to keep the multiple void years in place as the Baltimore Ravens did with Nelson Agholor this weekend, but that’s not particularly common.
The next few months will involve heavy bookkeeping by Brandon Beane and the rest of the front office. Time will tell if any among Micah Hyde, Leonard Floyd, DaQuan Jones, and/or Tim Settle Jr. suit up for the Buffalo Bills in 2024. Remember, it’s not a foregone conclusion that any of them move on.
What do you believe happens next?