There's a lot of questions about how Chad's incentives will affect the cap. Here is the answer from askthecommish.com How does the NFL Salary Cap treat cash incentives? Answer: All incentives are included in team salary if they are "likely to be earned" (LTBE). LTBE incentives are performance levels that the player or team has reached in the previous year. For example, if a quarterback threw twenty touchdowns last year and his incentive clause for this year is set at fifteen touchdowns, then this incentive is ?likely to be earned.? Also, incentives that are in the sole control of the player, like non-guaranteed reporting bonuses and off-season workout and weight bonuses, are considered LTBE. An impartial arbitrator will hear disputes between the owners and the players concerning what should be considered LTBE (especially for rookies or veterans who did not play in the prior year). Conversely, if a player did not reach the performance incentive in the previous year, the incentive is deemed "not likely to be earned" (NLTBE) and is not included in team salary. To determine whether a clause is LTBE or NLTBE for Salary Cap purposes (i.e., not whether the player actually earned the incentive), it is necessary to look at the performance of the team in the prior season, not the current season. For example, assume Player X receives an incentive bonus if he participates in 50% of the team?s offensive plays this season. Assume further that last season the team had 1,000 offensive plays. Therefore, as soon as Player X plays in 500 plays in the current season (or 50% of last year?s 1,000 plays), the incentive will be considered earned for Salary Cap purposes. The same incentive is considered "not earned" if the same player in the current year only participated in one of the team?s first 502 offensive plays. In this situation, it would be impossible for the player to achieve the 50% incentive based on last year?s performance of 1,000 plays. It is important to remember that looking to last year?s performance level is only for Salary Cap purposes and will not affect the player's right to receive a bonus for his performance in the current year. http://www.askthecommish.com/salarycap/faq.asp
Logical thinking suggests that the incentives would have to hit the salary cap at some point. Since there will be no salary cap next year, they have to hit this years cap.
If a deal gets done, then the incentives don't kick in until he reaches them. They would then hit 2007's cap. If a deal isn't reached, Penny will probably be released.
exerpt from http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/5158614 What they are scrambling about are certain limitations in the final capped year. Need an example? Usually when a player reaches an incentive in the season the hit is either pushed to the end of that season or the next season's cap. But in 2006, if no CBA is yet reached, whenever a player achieves his incentive, it would count immediately against the cap. Thus, we could have several players with a bunch of easily achievable incentives that would have to count immediately against a team's cap. So what happens if a team has a player reach $5 million in incentives by November? Good question, one that many teams are going to have to answer.
hmm..interesting..thanks for clearing that up. so there could be tons of mid season cuts just to stay under the salary cap...this is so ridiculous
The problem with that is that most vet contracts are guaranteed after the first game. Who could a team cut to get below the cap? Rookie salaries aren't very high. You could see teams having trouble fielding a team by late in the season.
