If safety Tyrann Mathieu is on the Cardinals roster three days into the new league year, he will get a $5 million roster bonus to go with $13.75 million in guaranteed salary for the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
Cardinals General Manager Steve Keim wasn’t saying what the team plans to do on Wednesday. Keim said that an evaluation process involving Mathieu’s fit with a new coaching staff as well as the salary cap is underway and that any decision will wait until that’s done.
“It’s what we are doing right now with the coaching staff, looking not only at Tyrann but every player, and see how they fit,” Keim said, via AZCentral.com. “How they fit what we are asking them to do schematically, and how they fit from a salary standpoint, all those things moving forward. And there are a lot of moving parts. What we are potentially doing in free agency, how it affects the cap, and I feel we have a pretty good grasp on that.”
Head coach Steve Wilks said he likes Mathieu’s skill set and that the safety “fits right into that mold” of what he’s done on defense in the past, which would seem to take care of some of the football evaluation.
The team suggested after the end of the regular season that they might look at revising Mathieu’s contract ahead of all that money becoming guaranteed. Whether that’s something Mathieu would do is unknown, although a tweet on Wednesday made it clear that he’s well aware that this is a time for teams and players to make business decisions.