The title might sound like a Saints fan trying to justify New Orleans' infamous restructure habit, but this article is about something different. It started when I saw the news that Jessie Bates III and the Bengals couldn't agree on a contract extension. My first reaction was "Cincinnati has plenty of cap space — why are they being so cheap?" But on closer thought, I realized there might be another factor at play. The topic is "guaranteed money," a term that's been in the spotlight thanks to Deshaun Watson's (CLE) blockbuster deal — and I think the recent trend is heading in a dangerous direction.

1. What is "fully guaranteed money" in a contract?

If you're already familiar with this, feel free to skip ahead to Section 2.

An NFL player's salary is fundamentally composed of two elements:

Base salary: Paid in installments across the 17 regular-season weeks (reportedly via game checks)

Signing bonus: Paid in full at the time the contract is signed and is non-refundable

Recent contracts often include roster bonuses, option bonuses, and incentives as well, but those aren't central to today's discussion, so I'll set them aside.

The key point: when a player is cut or traded, the team is generally not obligated to pay any remaining base salary (this is why cutting a player "frees up cap space").

The exception to that rule is base salary that was designated as "fully guaranteed" at the time the contract was signed.

As a recent example, let's look at Pittsburgh's Minkah Fitzpatrick, who signed a 4-year, $73M extension. Including the final year of his rookie deal in 2022, the contract can be viewed as a 5-year, $81M deal: $63.5M in base salary and $17.5M in signing bonus. His 2022 cap hit was kept to $8M, while the remaining four years were structured at a near-uniform $18M per year — a standard setup.

In the chart above, the crosshatched portions represent fully guaranteed base salary. If Pittsburgh were to release Fitzpatrick right now — immediately after signing the deal — how much would the team owe?

The signing bonus (blue) has already been paid and is obviously non-refundable. On the other hand, the team's obligation to pay future base salary would normally disappear upon release. However, this contract stipulates that the base salary for 2022 and 2023 is fully guaranteed.

That means the first two years of base salary ($19.5M), despite being base salary, must still be paid in full upon release (and counted as dead money). From Fitzpatrick's perspective, even if he were cut immediately: Signing bonus $17.5M + first two years of base salary $19.5M = $36M is money he's guaranteed to receive. This is what's referred to as "$36M fully guaranteed" — the same figure Adam Schefter reported.

This also means that cutting Fitzpatrick before the end of 2023 would trigger a massive dead money hit, effectively serving as a commitment from the franchise: "We won't cut you through at least 2023." Guaranteeing the first two years of a four- or five-year deal has become standard practice in recent years.

One important note on trades: when a player is traded, the guaranteed money obligations transfer to the acquiring team. For example, if Pittsburgh were to trade Fitzpatrick to New Orleans right now, the Saints — not the Steelers — would be on the hook for the guaranteed base salary in 2022 and 2023. Fully guaranteed money is a guarantee that the player will receive the money, not a guarantee that the original team will be the one paying all of it.

2. Deshaun Watson's absurd new deal

The contract that made "guaranteed money" a household talking point was the trade of Deshaun Watson from Houston to Cleveland this year. Normally, trades involve inheriting the previous team's contract, but with Watson weighing offers from Atlanta and New Orleans, Cleveland lured him by offering a brand-new 5-year, $230M deal — fully guaranteed in its entirety.

No matter when Watson is released over the next five years, he is guaranteed to receive the full $230M. The fact that Cleveland effectively declared "we're going all-in for five years" on a quarterback facing dozens of lawsuits who didn't even play the previous season made this one of the most talked-about contracts in NFL history.

Lining up the guaranteed money from major QB deals signed in 2022 makes Watson's contract look like an outlier of a different magnitude.

3. The guarantee trap and the wealth gap between owners

After that lengthy preamble, here's the key point: from a salary cap perspective, whether a salary is "fully guaranteed" or not is largely irrelevant — except when it comes to dead money if the player is cut. A $10M salary counts the same against the cap whether it's guaranteed or not.

However, there is a rule in the NFL's Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that makes guarantee status very much relevant to a team's actual finances:

Teams can't just promise guaranteed money without limits. They must have enough cash on hand to cover all guaranteed obligations — essentially proving they won't go bankrupt even if they release every player on the roster. For Watson's deal, the only amount paid upfront was his $45M signing bonus, but the remaining $185M in guarantees still had to be backed by funds the team could access at any time.

This is where the wealth gap among NFL owners becomes a real issue.

Denver's new owner Rob Walton (of Walmart) reportedly has a net worth of roughly $58 billion, while Las Vegas's Mark Davis ($500M) and Cincinnati's Mike Brown ($925M) fall well below $1 billion. Although the salary cap is identical for every team, Watson-style contracts that require massive escrow deposits are far easier for wealthy ownership groups to execute.

Since teams' actual account balances aren't made public, it's difficult to know exactly how much this funding rule constrains each GM's decision-making today. However, according to an article by a former agent, the impact is real: the author recalls being told by team negotiators on multiple occasions that his proposals couldn't be done because of funding.

A prime example is Cincinnati. Despite leaguewide trends moving in the opposite direction, the Bengals have stuck to a policy of not guaranteeing base salary in long-term deals — offering only signing bonus as guaranteed money. The hypothesis that this stems from the funding rule making larger guarantees financially untenable is entirely consistent. Jessie Bates III's refusal to agree to an extension has also been attributed to insufficient guaranteed money in the offer. In other words, it's entirely possible for a team to have cap space to spare but still be unable to close a deal because they can't fund the guarantees.

4. What happens if fully guaranteed contracts become the norm?

So what if Watson-style fully guaranteed contracts become standard going forward? (In the NBA, for reference, max-level contracts for star players are fully guaranteed as a matter of course.)

We'd certainly see more situations like Cincinnati's — and the result would be that the salary cap system becomes effectively meaningless.

Here's why: less wealthy teams, even with available cap space, could find themselves unable to sign players to large deals because they can't fund the guarantee escrow. Meanwhile, players naturally prefer more guaranteed money, so they'd gravitate toward wealthier teams.

In other words, the fundamental premise of the salary cap — "regulating total team spending to eliminate the financial advantages of richer franchises and promote competitive balance" — would break down. A world where star players, especially top quarterbacks, can only be signed by wealthy ownership groups is not a level playing field.

On top of that, contract restructures — the mechanism New Orleans has famously embraced, and one that nearly every team now uses — work by converting base salary into signing bonus, spreading the cap hit over future years. But since the converted amount becomes signing bonus, it must be paid in cash immediately at the time of restructure. This draws down a team's available funds, meaning heavy restructuring is yet another luxury that wealthier franchises can afford more easily.

To summarize: even under the salary cap system, each team's flexibility in roster-building and contract negotiations is constrained to some degree by the ownership's actual wealth — and the more that guaranteed money increases as a proportion of contracts, the more pronounced this disparity becomes.

Even if a five-year fully guaranteed deal is an extreme case, the upward trend in guaranteed money is unmistakable when you look at recent deals for Rodgers, Stafford, and others. From a competitive balance perspective, this isn't a healthy direction. Spotrac has made a similar observation, noting that NFL owners are required to escrow every guaranteed dollar beyond the current league year, and that this is set to become an increasingly significant issue.

5. Kyler Murray's new deal and what comes next

This isn't the first time fully guaranteed QB contracts have made waves in the NFL. In 2018, Kirk Cousins (MIN) signed a 3-year, $84M deal that was fully guaranteed and generated significant buzz. But when Atlanta's Matt Ryan (5-year, $150M, $95M guaranteed) and Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers (4-year, $134M, $79M guaranteed) subsequently signed traditional-structure extensions, the fully guaranteed movement stalled.

So what about this year, now that Watson has reset the bar? This week, Kyler Murray (ARI) became the first young QB to sign a major extension since Watson, agreeing to a 5-year, $230.5M deal — nearly identical in total value.

Offensive Rookie of the Year plus two Pro Bowls in his first three seasons. His only playoff appearance ended in a loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Rams, and somehow he gets labeled as a "QB without a track record" — which is genuinely unfair. When 30-plus-year-old veterans like Stafford (LAR) and Carr (LV) are earning $40M per year, this figure looks entirely reasonable for a 24-year-old Murray. Also worth noting: the salary cap rises by roughly 5–10% annually, so comparing a 2022 deal to Mahomes' 2020 contract and saying "he's making more than Mahomes!" is misleading.

Crucially, though, while Murray's deal matches Watson's in total value, his fully guaranteed money at signing was $105M — and reportedly there's no no-trade clause. At the very least, this means the feared scenario — "Watson's deal will set a new standard where every young franchise QB demands full guarantees" — did not materialize. In a way, the fact that Arizona isn't one of the league's wealthier franchises may have actually worked in the league's favor here.

Some have argued that Murray's deal "raised the market and put teams with upcoming QB extensions in a tough spot." I disagree. By breaking the momentum toward fully guaranteed contracts that Watson had created, this deal actually reassured GMs around the league.

That said, it remains to be seen whether this will end up being a repeat of the 2018 Cousins situation — where Cleveland's deal is eventually dismissed as an aberration — or whether another agent will secure a fully guaranteed contract and keep the trend alive. There are certainly voices, like RGIII's below, urging players to demand full guarantees.

The quarterback who will likely determine the direction of this trend is Lamar Jackson (BAL). The outcome of his negotiations will have ripple effects on next year's deals for Justin Herbert (LAC) and Joe Burrow (CIN). If fully guaranteed contracts do become the norm, it would be especially tough on the cash-strapped Bengals.

Most fans and media will focus on the average annual value when the next big QB deal is announced — and that's understandable. But next time, I'd encourage you to pay close attention to the "Fully Guaranteed Money" figure as well. That number might tell a more important story.

---

References

• Agent's Take: Is Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed Browns contract a game-changer in the NFL? Here's a look — CBS Sports
• NFL's richest owners ranked from 32 to 1 — Pro Football Network
• Funding rule likely kept Cardinals from fully guaranteeing Kyler Murray deal — Pro Football Talk