Roster bonuses, other devices force teams to make early decisions

[The Dolphin]

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In Cincinnati, the Bengals held linebacker Vontaze Burfict through the first five days of free agency. In Miami, the Dolphins are squatting on defensive end Robert Quinn, in the hopes of eventually buying another draft pick by paying part of his salary to facilitate a trade.

Those two players and others ended up not available in the first few days of free agency because their contracts lacked for 2019 a clause that forced a quick decision.

Plenty of contracts have them. For many players, it’s a roster bonus due on the fifth day of the league year, like the payment recently earned by Eli Manning. For others, injury guarantees become fully guaranteed within a few days after the start of the league year.

The problem is that teams often resist putting devices like that in the later years of a contract, considering the flexibility in year three, four, or five of the contract part of the quid pro quo for the money paid in the first year or two. However, every multi-year contract should at this point contain in the second and third year (at a minimum) some sort of clause that forces the team to make a decision within a few days after the start of free agency, so that the player will know where he’s going to be for the coming year, sooner than later.

Absent a sizable roster bonus or a term that makes the salary for the coming season fully guaranteed, the team can keep the player around, in theory, until the eve of the regular-season opener before dropping out of the blue a take-a-pay-cut-or-take-a-hike ultimatum. With all other teams having their budgets largely spent and their rosters largely set by then, the player often won’t have many/any options if he chooses to refuse the request to slash his salary.

Having a trigger early in the league year forces the issue to a head much earlier, at a time when a player would have other possible destinations and the leverage that flows from it. So if the player’s current team squeezes him on March 15, if he declines, and if he’s cut before earning the roster bonus, he can go elsewhere, receive fair pay, get up to speed with his new team, and be much more ready to contribute to his new team come September.

The fact that this isn’t a new phenomenon for teams underscores the importance of agents getting these terms in player contracts. And, if/when players choose to negotiate their own deals, they need to insist on terms like that, so that the team won’t be able to control the relationship for more than five months while the player wonders when or if the axe may fall.

And it doesn’t take five months for the damage to be done. Last year, the Cowboys held receiver Dez Bryant’s contract until the middle of April, for no reason other than they could. By the time he was cut, anyone who may have been interested in the middle of March had already made their free-agency moves, forcing Bryant to wait a very long time before the phone eventually rang.