The Saints are about to get a new windfall of salary cap space on Friday. Thanks to their releasing safety Jairus Byrd earlier in the offseason as a post-June 1 move, his base salary will be cleared off of the books without incurring any acceleration of un-allocated bonuses from future years.
Here’s how it works.
When a player signs a deal, he is normally given a hefty signing bonus. To help teams manage their cap, the signing bonus is paid up front, but it’s spread evenly across the five years of the deal. So when Byrd signed his six-year, $54 million deal with $11 million signing bonus in 2014, the cap hit from that $11 million was spread evenly across five seasons at $2.