Justice And Celek Contract Details

Reuben Frank helpfully provided details for Winston Justice's contract and for Brent Celek's contract.

The most interesting thing I learned from these was that the week 10 deadline for using raises in base salary to eat up cap space in the current year doesn't apply in the Final Capped Year. So Justice and Celek both got big raises that ate up cap space.

Also, if you are looking at the details, note that each player only gets a portion of the raise he nominally got for 2009, covering the remaining portion of the season at the time the deal was agreed to (I assume that Justice's deal was agreed to prior to the Bears game, and only announced later, due to the beautiful way the numbers work out with that assumption).

Justice got a $4.78 million signing bonus and a $1.22 million raise in 2009, for total guaranteed money of $6 million even. His total deal is worth $18.15 million in new money.

Brent Celek's new deal is a little dicier. There are some things missing from Reuben Frank's summary. First, we are short on bonus money. As I calculate it, there is only the $6 million signing bonus and the $2.02 million raise in 2009, for about $8 million in guaranteed money. I had understood that number to be bigger, so there must be guaranteed components somewhere that we have yet to learn about. I don't know what the salary cap impact of those will be. Second, to comply with the 30% rule, there has to be some phony LTBE bonuses in 2011 and 2012. However, these are the numbers based on the data we currently have:

Note that between the two contracts, $5.4 million of cap space was used up. My guess is that the Eagles have less than $200K of cap space remaining at this point. So to the extent that there are any extensions left to come, they have to be salary cap neutral for 2009. A guy like Nick Cole has the base salary to accommodate such a deal, but there aren't many others beyond him who does.