Chiefs Patrick Mahomes Again One of the Highest Paid Players in the NFL
Chiefs and Mahomes reached a restructured contract paying him $208.1 million over the next 4 years
Patrick Mahomes is no longer near the bottom of the top 10 QB contracts in the NFL. On Monday afternoon the team signed Mahomes to a restructured contract that will pay him the most of any QB in the NFL over the next four seasons. Essentially the Chiefs looked at his contract and moved up a little less than $47 million dollars over the next four years from the back of the contract.
The timing of this is a little surprising and I’m still trying to understand how this deal freed up room in the 2023 salary cap. According to Field Yates this restructure frees up $2.5 million dollars in 2023. That would essentially double their free cap space that they currently have. I don’t expect this move to be something that means they are making a move. I am guessing this just gives them more operating capital for the 2023 season.
So what does this deal look like? How does it affect the Chiefs’ future cap space? And how does it change the ability of the Chiefs to be cap-compliant and still add talent?
“New Money”
Signing Bonus
Mahomes received a $20.57 million dollar signing bonus for the new restructure. Looks like he will receive half the signing bonus now and the other half in April of 2024. This won’t affect the cap due to being paid later but it is something you see as it spreads out the cash needed.
That signing bonus is spread out over 5 years and will count for about $4.11 million a year from 2023 to 2027. This gives the Chiefs the ability to spread out a portion of the deal and get more space in 2023. Interestingly enough another way they created space in 2023 is a salary reduction for Patrick. He went from $5.5 million over 18 weeks to $1.326 million over 18 weeks. The weird salary amount is due to the first two paychecks for the games that have already been paid.
Additional Income
Mahomes will make $43.3 million more over the next four seasons than he was scheduled to make under his new contract. We’ve already discussed the signing bonus but for 2023 he will get a $13.9 million dollar raise. In 2024 he will get a $6.55 million raise, in 2025 $8.05 million raise and in 2026 a raise of $14.8 million. Again all of this is not new money persay. He will be making more now for a contract that will pay him less after 2026.