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(02-22-2023, 10:21 PM)Nepa Wrote: Thank you for the detailed and very informative explanation. Watson already had a 45-million-dollar signing bonus. How can he get yet another signing bonus? Do they just redo a new contract and thus get to do yet another signing bonus? What is the maximum signing bonus one can give?

Yeah, that's what is almost always meant when you hear about someone "restructuring" their contract. Just them getting a chunk of their current year's base salary up front in the form of a signing bonus to move numbers around purely for cap accounting reasons. They're not taking less money, actually more upfront in a lump sum rather than spread out in game checks so they can make more money off of that money now rather than wait for it later over time.

Pretty positive there's no limit of signing bonus you can get. It's all still eventually accounted for under the cap, so it's really just how much you're able/willing to shell out as an owner. 

I imagine if an extra filthy rich owner (by even NFL owner standards) started throwing around huge signing bonuses out of the normal escalation there'd be some other owners upset about the precedent that they were setting that other players would start to expect from other owners, which is why there was so much hubbub about Watson's big fully guaranteed deal. Ultimately there isn't much they could do to overtly stop that owner from doing it without the NFLPA suing for collusion and then Congress getting involved with the NFL's business.