Kansas City Chiefs DE Alex Okafor appears to have done the team a favor.
According to a new report from NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, Okafor has signed a restructured contract with the Chiefs. His newly agreed-upon deal clears $2 million in cap space for the 2020 NFL season. He’ll make a maximum of $4.96 million in 2020 according to Pelissero. That number includes $860K in per-game roster bonuses and an additional $2 million in incentives.
The new deal also makes it so that Okafor becomes a free agent in 2021. Okafor originally wasn’t slated to become an unrestricted free agent until the 2022 season. He originally signed a three-year deal worth just under $18 million in the 2019 offseason.
Okafor became a starter opposite Frank Clark for the bulk of the 2019 season. He suffered a torn pectoral in Week 15, which ended his season. He’s not currently on the PUP list, which tells us that he’s healthy and ready to play for the 2020 season.
Brett Veach and his team are clearly looking for ways to address the inevitable problem of the Chiefs’ salary cap in 2021. The latest reports had Kansas City at $13 million in cap space for the 2020 season. With a salary cap floor of $175 million in 2021, even if the Chiefs rolled over all of their available cap space, they’d still be $14 million over the cap.
This move creates an additional $2 million in cap space that the team can roll over into 2021. It also appears to eliminate Okafor’s cap hit of nearly $8 million in 2021 by making him a free agent. This move puts the team in a much better salary cap situation for the future, but it adds another hole to fill on the roster as well.
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