The contracts of a number of Buffalo Bills starters from the 2023 NFL season were voided on Monday. Therefore, starting with the 2024 NFL season, those dead-cap charges were formally implemented for One Bills Drive. To be clear, none of this is surprising because these contracts were intended to be void.
General manager Brandon Beane and the Bills let the contracts of defensive tackles DaQuan Jones and Tim Settle, safety Micah Hyde, and edge rusher Leonard Floyd expire instead of being extended.
Since the end of the 2020 NFL season, when the wage limit actually dropped for the first time in ten years, giving general managers and all 32 clubs less money to deal with year, void-year contracts have grown more prevalent. Teams append “dummy seasons” known as “void years” to the end of a player’s contract. During these “dummy seasons,” they use the signing bonus to stretch out a player’s contract over a longer period of time than is now allowed (up to five years). A player’s pro-rated years of signing bonus become part of the current year’s cap when they are close to the void year(s) of their current contract and aren’t re-signed to a new deal with the franchise.
Let’s go back to Micah Hyde’s predicament from March 2022, when the Bills reworked his deal to distribute the salary cap burden over a few seasons. I’ll give a brief overview of our work from that article here; for more details, go to the original source.
