It’s 5 o’clock somewhere…
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Sosna will report to GM Adam Peters and serve as the team’s lead contract negotiator. He will also oversee multiple departments, including analytics, health and wellness, and football administration. https://t.co/yVT2zLojeu
— Nicki Jhabvala (@NickiJhabvala) May 20, 2024
Front office moves seem to get more attention in Washington than in other NFL cities, probably because we all became intimately aware of the FO executives over the final years of the previous owner’s tenure as one after another was caught up in scandal or testified in front of a Congressional committee.
I wonder how many fan bases even know who the salary cap guy is for their team.
Washington’s cap gurus
For many years in Washington, Eric Schaffer did that job for the Redskins, and he was quite conservative in his approach to cap management. If I saw a tweet from a player’s agent with the contract value and the number of years, in about 3 minutes I could estimate the cap hit for every year of that contract drawn up by Schaffer. He was very consistent in how he did things. He was capable of writing an exotic contract if it was needed (see: Landon Collins), but he mostly colored inside the lines and stayed pretty vanilla in his approach.
When Schaffer left the franchise, I was a bit surprised when Ron Rivera opted to bring in Rob Rogers, who was around the same age as Rivera himself. I had expected him to opt for someone younger who would be around for a long time. That, however, was shortly after Rivera had arrived in Washington, and before I understood that his intent was to import as many of his cronies from the Carolina Panthers as possible.
On Monday, it was widely reported that the team has hired Brandon Sosna away from the Detroit Lions (where he worked with Commanders’ Assistant General Manager Lance Newmark). As you can see from the tweet above, Sosna will be the ‘lead contract negotiator’. At the time that I am writing this, it is unclear whether this spells the end for Rob Rogers in DC, or if Rogers will report to Sosna. Of course, in this age of social media reporting, it’s possible that that detail might be made clear between the time I write this and when I press the button to publish it.
Cap management philosophy & contract structures
What does seem apparent is that Sosna will likely craft contracts in the same framework that Rogers used in free agency this year. In an effort to get a feeling for is approach to contract construction and cap management, I looked at the top-10 contracts for the Lions today, and saw that 8 of them were signed/extended during Sosna’s two year tenure in Detroit. It was immediately noticeable that they bear a strong resemblance to the 3-year contracts we saw Rogers writing in free agency this offseason.
Re: Brandon Sosna
I looked at the top-10 Lions contracts; all but 2 were signed/extended since Sosna joined Lions:
-2 were multi-year deals w/out void years
-1 was a single-year contract
-3 had a single void year
-2 had 3 void years each (1 w/options to max out cap deferment)— Bill-in-Bangkok (@billhorgan2005) May 20, 2024
Sosna has been using void years rather aggressively in Detroit. He was not absolutely maximizing every contract, but he is certainly putting an emphasis on deferring salary cap hits, which, as I’ve written before, is a smart thing to do.
In fact, as I reviewed the structure of the 8 contracts written for Detroit players, I was struck by how very similar they were in structure to what I saw from Rogers this past March. The thought popped into my brain that maybe Rogers adopted that particular strategy in Washington this year under the direction of AGM Lance Newmark, who was recently hired away from that very same Detroit Lions front office. In his previous three seasons here under Ron Rivera, Rogers had used void years in contracts, but only sparingly.
April 1st trigger
In my March article on this topic, I also made the following observation:
I want to compare the contract notes from Daron Payne’s 2023 free agent contract and Dorrance Armstrong’s 2024 free agent contract:
Daron Payne:
If on the roster on the 3rd day of the league year in 2024 Payne will receive an additional $1 million of guarantees in 2024 and $9 million of his 2025 base salary will be fully guaranteed. If on the roster on the 3rd day of the 2025 league year, another $4 million is fully guaranteed.
Dorrance Armstrong:
If on the roster on April 1 of 2025 Armstrong’s 2025 salary will be fully guaranteed.
Obviously, the front office of every team faces critical roster decisions every year. This year, for example, the new league year began on March 13th. On March 16th (the 3rd day of the 2024 league year) Daron Payne got an extra $10m in guarantees. This probably wasn’t a tough call, but for a different player or a different situation the decision could have been quite critical. This year, for example, if Russell Wilson had been on the Broncos roster on the 5th day of the league year (18 March), his 2025 salary would have become guaranteed, which created some urgency for the team to make a decision about him before that date.
Next year, both Payne and Armstrong will secure added guaranteed money by simply being on the roster; however, Payne’s money gets locked in in mid-March, while Armstrong’s money doesn’t get locked in until April 1st.
The advantage of this change, from the team’s standpoint, should be obvious. If the team is in any doubt about the player’s future with the team, then the April 1st date allows the GM to get all the way through the first wave of free agency and still have time to make a decision before veteran offseason workout programs begin.
Contrast this to the language in Daron Payne’s contract, in which a decision has to be made while the front office is in the midst of its most hectic week of the year as it negotiates with free agents. In fact, only three days into free agency, the GM may not yet be sure about the current player’s future with the team.
This small change that involves moving the contract trigger date back about 2 weeks is subtle but smart contract management. I’ve read that this is a practice that Peters brought from San Francisco. It seems almost insignificant before you stop and think about it, but when you realize the impact it can have on the timing and urgency of multi-million-dollar decisions, you realize that this small break from NFL convention is pretty damned smart.
Looking at the Lions contracts done by Sosna, the use of the 1 April trigger date was not a feature. The Lions were using the conventional trigger of ‘5 days after the start of the new league year’. As noted in the excerpt above, the April 1st trigger date is something that I understand Adam Peters brought from San Francisco.
Getting the recipe right
It is becoming clear to me through both direct and indirect evidence, that bringing people from varied backgrounds (Peters, Newmark, Eugene Shen, Sosna, etc) and blending their various experiences can be (if done the right way) a powerful recipe for good management of an NFL team.