Philly Front Office

[Sarah McLachlan’s song “Angel” playing]

Every single hour on TV, Jalen Hurts is critically abused. People want him traded, cut, or to join Embiid on a one way kicking into the sun. I am here to tell you that he needs to be rescued not removed. This is not because I cry every time I look at Super Bowl highlights and I personally believe in him. It is not because he has literally the second best winning percentage of all time. And it is not because he is impossibly handsome. No. I ask you to stop the abuse for one reason…his contract. Not only is he not going anywhere now, but he isn’t going anywhere for a long time.

Jalen signed an extension after leading the Birds to the Super Bowl and putting on one of the greatest performances we ever saw. His 5 year $255m contract was the biggest ever for a few minutes but has since been passed a few times over. The contract structure, like so many others for the Eagles, has several void years to lower the salary cap hit. You can’t just magically declare that $51m isn’t really $51m, it needs to be accounted for. A contract like his is so heavily spread out by these void years that it is essentially a guarantee of a future extension. You don’t hand out a deal like this without believing you have found your one and only.

To understand this deal, you need to know a few things. First, a bonus is prorated and extended for cap purposes through every year of a contract including void years. Base salary is what gets accounted for year by year (btw, when you hear the term restructure, that means taking the current high base salary and converting it to a bonus to spread the cap hit). Second, a void year is a year of a contract without a salary, meaning it is not something that can be played under because the player is not receiving any pay. The bonuses that were due to be accounted for in the nonexistent void years get accelerated to the coming year. Granted no money is due, but the balance sheet comes calling. Third, Hurts signed his contract with a year left on his existing contract and it contains 4 void years. The new deal essentially covers 10 years rather than the reported 5.

Time to dissect. The contract structure is 6 years of minimal base salary, around $1.2m. Hurts received $23m at signing along with guaranteed salary and bonuses for his first 3 years. Every year of his deal comes with an “option bonus.” This is basically extra salary but labeled a bonus for cap purposes. The option bonus money gets spread across the remaining years of the deal each time it is triggered (you cannot get away with this kind of accounting bullshit with your own business by the way). The first 3 years of option bonuses are guaranteed. The 4th year (2026) vests at the beginning of his 3rd year (2025). The 5th year vests at the beginning of the 5th year (2027) and same for the 6th (2028).

Each year he is on the Eagles, more money gets added to the backend of the contract for accounting purposes. Ideally, he comes to the 5th year (so one year remaining) and gets another extension. The bonus money that is still on the balance sheet gets to flow into the new years and another bunch of void years. Basically, instead of $100m being due in 1 year, it can be spread over the next 10 more years and so on.

Unfortunately, “ideally” is not why I wrote this or why you are reading it. Let’s say we get to the worst-case scenario of Hurts being so bad that he has no trade value (not likely, I’ll get to this). Cutting him will not be even remotely possible until before the 2028 season and even that is nuts. Because of the option bonuses, his dead cap number without playing for the Eagles in 2028 would be roughly $97m. If you go to Overthecap.com it won’t show this because the options have not technically been exercised yet. I do not believe a post June 1 cut (spreads the cap hit to the next season) is possible because that will trigger another $49m in bonus. It will spread that $150m over two years, but WTF!

So, what happens if we trade him? Bonuses are paid up front which means they have to be accounted for by the team that pays them, not the team that employs him. The accounting for signing and option bonuses already paid by the Eagles accelerate to the Eagles cap sheet right away. His base salary and future options are what get traded. Let’s say they wanted to trade him after the current season. If this happens after the 3rd day of the league year, the Eagles will have to pay him about $40m in his option bonus, but the team trading him will have to pay his $1.2m salary. For salary cap purposes, assuming the trade occurs after June 1, that option bonus ($40m) PLUS the remains of his prorated initial signing bonus ($14m) PLUS his previous year’s prorated option bonus ($35m) are due between this year and the next. So that’s two years of $45m-ish cap sheet craters that we would still need to fill with a Super Bowl ready QB for this loaded roster. The same thing happens year after year and even gets a little worse as time goes on because the bonuses get bigger.

There is no realistic “out” in the contract. However, we do have some wiggle room in a trade. Because the Eagles are the ones with the salary cap problem, the team that trades for him would only have to pay his base salary of $1.2m for the year he gets traded. That’s a ridiculous bargain. Granted he has a full no trade clause so he will likely demand an extension to make the trade go through, but a team might be willing to take that chance because of the initial bargain. It would be like trading for the end of a rookie contract. We would have to just completely eat those two years though.

So next time you want to abuse Jalen’s QB skills, just think of Sarah McLachlan, calm down, and remember that’s our quarterback.