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you have to be a special level of unreasonable, as a sports fan, to find len pasquarelli’s newest article on tom brady’s contract restructuring interesting, but i do. as a devout 49ers fan, i’m very well acquainted with the pain that can come to a team when it makes too many of these “contract-delaying” maneuvers.

the 49ers used to do this all of the time back in the 90′s, eventually mortgaging the future of the team for immediate winning (hey, i’m not saying that it’s wrong to do so, but just that it results in an eventual period of cap nightmare). for the niners, the result was several years (during mariucci and erickson’s reigns) where we were cutting quality veterans left and right to clear cap room.

so what actually happened here? well to simplify the article, let’s take a really basic version (not exactly accurate) of the example. tom brady was originally expected to make, in base salary:

• 2007: $6M
  
• 2008: $5M
• 2009: $2.3M
• 2010: $3.5M

there are also additional roster bonuses and such attached to each of those years, but let’s just start with that number.

now under the restructuring, they essentially converting $5.28M of this year’s $6M into a one-time signing bonus that he is receiving, essentially, now. the thing about signing bonuses is that such guaranteed money, though it’s received once, is then spread out evenly across the years of the contract, adding to the player’s value against the salary cap. in other words (once again, leaving out key bonuses and other info), they are removing $5.28M from his 2007 cap number, and tacking 1/4 of that onto each of the remaining four years of his contract. something like:

• 2007: $720,000 + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $2.04M
• 2008: $5M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $6.32M
• 2009: $2.3M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $3.62M
• 2010: $3.5M + ($5.28M / 4 years) = $4.82M
  

so if you see what they’ve done, the patriots have really taken money off of 2007′s cap (to fit randy’s contract in), and forwarded the cap number to future years. it doesn’t look like a whole lot of change, but given a cap of a little more than $100M and around 40+ players on an NFL squad, you can see how adding a million or two can make a big difference.

it’s still a far cry from the wholesale full-roster mortgaging that the niners used to do, but it’s a move that will dictate some interesting future transactions. maybe i’m the only football nerd out there, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless.