1. RESTRICTED FREE AGENT (RFA) RULES HEADED INTO DRAFT:
As of last Friday, RFAs are no longer allowed to sign Offer Sheets with other teams. This essentially makes those players the exclusive property of their current team.
Those players are not, at this time, required to sign the Tender they received and can sit out all offseason programs, OTAs and mini-camps if they choose to.
As of this writing, the following six (6) Ravens have yet to sign their RFA Tenders: OT Jared Gaither, FB Le’Ron McClain, WR Mark Clayton, CB Fabian Washington, P Sam Koch and S Dawan Landry.
Those players also cannot be traded until they have signed their RFA Tenders. So, for players like Jared Gaither and Mark Clayton – players rumored to be on the trading block – the first sign that the trade rumors may be true would be a report that the player has signed his Tender, and is thus, tradeable.
If the player has not signed his RFA Tender by June 1, the Ravens will have to again tender a contract to the player and that contract must be for the same amount as the RFA Tender. If the player does not receive a June 1 Tender, then the player becomes a free agent.
If the player has not signed the June 1 Tender by June 15th, then the team can rescind that offer and replace it with a new Tender in the amount of 110% of the player’s 2009 base salary. For a player like Jared Gaither that would mean that the team would be able to reduce his expected salary from the $2.4M that he is set to receive under the RFA Tender down to just over $500K, which represents 110% of his 2009 base salary.
Needless to say, if he’s still on the team, you can expect Gaither – and all of the Ravens’ remaining unsigned RFAs – to sign his RFA Tender before June 15th.
2. UNCAPPED YEAR RULES LIKELY HINDERING RAVENS’ ATTEMPTS TO RE-SIGN HALOTI NGATA:
Blame it on the Uncapped Year.
The CBA Rules as they relate to the uncapped year contain a provision that is going to make it difficult for the Ravens to give Ngata the contract extension that he deserves.
One of the Uncapped Year rules is the 30% Rule which places a limit on contracts renegotiated and/or extended during the Uncapped Year. Basically, a contract that was signed during a Capped Year (for Ngata, 2006) can be renegotiated and extended during the Uncapped Year, but only if the player’s “salary” increases annually by no more than 30% of his 2009 “salary.”
For the purposes of the 30% Rule, “salary” is basically base salary plus option bonus prorations.
Ngata’s 2009 salary was a little under $2.4M, so that means that the most Ngata could make (signing bonus excluded) is as follows:
2010: $3.12M
2011: 3.84M
2012: 4.56M
2013: 5.28M
2014: $6M
2015: $6.72M
While those numbers are certainly nothing to sneeze at, they only total just over $29.5M, and usually you would expect higher base salaries for the kind of deal that Ngata will command.
So, in order to balance that out, the Ravens would have to give Ngata a huge, upfront signing bonus because signing bonus money is not considered as part of the 30% calculation.
The Ravens have always preferred to split bonus money into a signing bonus in year one and an option bonus in year two (and sometimes a little in year three, as well). But, in Ngata’s case the 30% Rule would force the club to give one upfront signing bonus of $35-40M to balance out the relatively modest base salaries shown above.
The Ravens would probably not be that adverse to giving a huge bonus to Ngata – he’s certainly not someone the team would have to worry about with regard to off-field issues – but it’s also an issue of just how much money the Ravens can spend at this point in real world dollars and cents.
Already this offseason, the Ravens have paid a $23M option bonus to Terrell Suggs and have also paid close to $22M in other bonuses to Domonique Foxworth, Ray Lewis, Anquan Boldin, Michael Oher, Derrick Mason and Corey Redding. That’s a total of $45M in bonus money paid to just 7 players. As a point of reference, the Ravens spent $112M on their total payroll (all salaries and bonuses) in 2009.
With the possibility of a work stoppage in 2011, it remains to be seen if the Ravens even have the necessary cash flow to take on another bonus – especially one of that magnitude.
That said this dilemma is not unique to the Ravens.
Several other teams are also facing this same problem with players like Chris Johnson, Nick Mangold and Kevin Kolb. Like Ngata those players are still playing under their rookie deals at very modest “salaries”, thus making it difficult to reach viable contract terms given the handcuffs of the 30% Rule.
While there may be a yet-to-be-disclosed, creative way to get around the 30% Rule, for all of those players – Ngata included – it may end up being the case that they will have to wait until the offseason to get their contract extensions.
3. CONTRACT ESCALATORS: Two Ravens had their base salaries for 2010 increased by contract escalators. QB Joe Flacco saw his base salaries for 2010, 2011 and 2012 increase by $1M each year and he also received a $200K bump in 2010 for winning one playoff game last year (he received a $400K bump in 2009 for the two 2008 playoff wins). As such, his base salary increased from $1.46M to $2.66M.
Haloti Ngata’s 2010 base salary increased by $750K to $1.746M. Ngata had up to $2M in escalators due, but he apparently didn’t meet all of the necessary criteria.
