When Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said the team didn’t add any special protections in the Dez Bryant contract, some wondered whether it was a matter of semantics, given that the Cowboys previously had beefed up the language that would trigger a voiding of guaranteed payments in some recent contracts, including the one signed by first-round cornerback Byron Jones.
As it turns out, the Cowboys truly didn’t attach any special protections to the Dez deal.
Per a league source, the Cowboys used the standard language for voiding guaranteed payments. As the source explained it, teams are sufficiently protected by the boilerplate language in the standard contract, along with other protections contained in the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
For Dez, roughly $9 million currently hinges on the avoidance of anything that would void future guarantees, since $20 million of his fully-guaranteed money was earned as a signing bonus and the other $3 million comes via 2015 base salary. As of March 2016, another $12 million becomes fully guaranteed -- and in turn susceptible to the voiding of the guarantees.
Regardless, Dez managed to avoid the onerous terms that showed up in contracts like the one signed by Jones, which wipes out future guarantees if, for example, the player missing a treatment session while injured or misses a practice because he was merely detained by police.