Kirk Cousins (and Trumaine Johnson) have shown high-end players a path to free agency despite being on the wrong end of the franchise tag. The next question becomes whether Cousins will be blazing a new trail regarding fully-guaranteed contracts.
It’s not a new question, and Cousins isn’t the first player to parlay free agency into three fully-guaranteed years. Ndamukong Suh did it in 2015, with three fully-guaranteed years on the six-year deal that was scrapped by Miami just as the fourth year was due to become fully guaranteed, too. Jay Cutler secured a similar term in 2014 with the Bears, getting three fully-guaranteed years at $54 million at a time when his contract in Chicago had expired.
The significance of the Cousins deal comes from the absence of non-guaranteed years on the back end, which allow the team to both spread the cap hit into more than three years and permit the team to keep the player around at a time when salary figures that looked good when the contract was signed suddenly become not so impressive in relation to the growth of the salary cap and increases to the market at the player’s position.
Cousins had tried while negotiating with Washington to tie compensation in the out years of a long-term deal to a percentage of the cap, in order to keep the contract from becoming as obsolete as Aaron Rodgers’ contract now is. Cornerback Darrelle Revis, who signed in 2015 a deal that carried full guarantees into the third year of the contract (but didn’t fully guarantee all of his 2017 salary), also tried to do that in 2010 during his holdout with the Jets.
With teams still not willing to give players cap-percentage protection, and with the funding rule (which is codified in the Collective Bargaining Agreement at Article 26, Section 9) making teams unwilling to put significant salaries to be paid in the fourth, fifth, or sixth year into escrow, the ideal combination for Cousins became a short-term, fully-guaranteed deal.
That’s what Cousins will get, and it will put him back on the open market at the age of 32. Even if the contract allows the Vikings to tag Cousins, the Drew Brees grievance from 2012 means that Cousins would be eligible for a 44-percent bump over his 2020 cap year (since Cousins has been tagged twice before), making the franchise tag likely too expensive.
The next question becomes whether other players (specifically quarterbacks) could be able to turn remaining contractual years into short-term, fully-guaranteed contracts, and whether their teams would provide full guarantees for four, five, or six seasons.
The first test case will be Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. He has two years left under his current contract. This, in theory, puts the Packers four years away from the point at which they’d be faced with the 44-percent conundrum, which placed Cousins on the open market. Will the Packers rip up the last two years of his deal and fully guarantee three, four, five, six seasons to Rodgers? Will they give him a three-year, fully-guaranteed contract to replace his remaining two years, resulting in a huge raise for Rodgers and only one more year of certainty for the Packers?
It remains to be seen what the Packers will do (the compromise could be three fully-guaranteed years plus two or three non-guaranteed seasons on the back end), but it’s important to remember the difference between the extension of a contract with one or more years remaining on it and the negotiation of a contract from scratch on the open market. Cousins, who was unrestricted, got three years, fully guaranteed. It will be harder for players with one or more years left on their current deals to get the same deal.
However it plays out, fully-guaranteed contracts are neither required nor permitted by the current labor deal. Players can negotiate guarantees, and teams can agree to them. Universal use would result in teams being forced to keep (or at least to pay) players who no longer deserve the money, reducing the money that would be available under the salary cap.
Meanwhile, don’t forget (as some apparently have) that roughly 20 four-year, fully-guaranteed contracts already are given to players every year. That’s the norm for the incoming rookies taken at the top of the draft, with the unearned windfall they used to receive prior to 2011 now replaced by guaranteed cash flow for their first four NFL seasons.