Contract details for Dawson Knox are forthcoming.
The Buffalo Bills are still creating cap space as they approach the 2024 league year on Wednesday. The most recent move was reworking the deal of tight end Dawson Knox, per Jeremy Fowler of ESPN.
“The Bills and tight end Dawson Knox have agreed to a reworked contract that lessens his $14.4M cap hit this year, per source. More needed space for Buffalo.”
The “reworked” in the quote leads me to believe it’s a pay cut for Knox and not a classic restructure. Knox wouldn’t have had to agree to a restructure, but does have to sign off on a pay cut like this.
We saw one of these reworkings last week when the Bills cut Von Miller’s salary and added a bunch of incentives to help him earn the money back if he has a big year. Like Miller, Knox is coming back from injury so a lot of those incentives can be relatively reasonable but still not count on the 2024 salary cap.
The CBA splits incentives into Likely To Be Earned (LTBE) and Not Likely To Be Earned (NLTBE). The LTBE incentives were benchmarks the player hit last year while NLTBE incentives weren’t met the prior season. If it’s NLTBE, it doesn’t count on the current year salary cap. If the player achieves the benchmark, it’s added to the following year’s cap commitment.
Knox had a fully guaranteed $5 million roster bonus due this week and $3.58 million in salary also guaranteed. Later this week, another $1.33 million was set to fully guarantee, as well. His cap hit was set to be $14.3 million but his dead cap hit of more than $20 million meant he was going to be on the roster.
At a minimum, I expected the Bills to restructure the deal to push out that guaranteed money into future cap years. The language of the Fowler tweet puts the entire 2024 and beyond compensation into doubt.
We will update when we get details.