How Could Guarantees Hold Up JPJ Deal? | Steelers Morning Rush

0:00Hello, good morning and welcome to another episode of Steve's Morning Rush. I'm Alan Saunders. It is Wednesday, September 9th, and that means the 2026 NFL season is here. The opening game kicking off tonight between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots in a rematch of the Super Bowl tomorrow in Melbourne, Australia, Rams and 49ers. And then I'm not college football and high school football takeover until Sunday. Well, I'm on other things, but we're stillers. We'll play the Atlanta Falcons at 1 p.m. at Aggershirt Stadium TV map out for that once in a while. You can check it out at the top of the site stillersnow.com. Chris Ward writing that as we're speaking, but I'm sure to be a pretty decent map for you out of town fans, which I always know is tough for you guys. So I'm good to see that. I want to answer a question I got yesterday about guarantees and what the difference is between guaranteed and fully guaranteed. This is going to be, it isn't the context of the Christian Involved Contract, which had

1:02about $102 million in total guarantees, but the full guarantee was in the $56 million read. What does that mean? What's the difference? What are guarantees? Let's dive deep into way NFL salary guarantees work. Basically, there are four ways that teams can guarantee a player's salary. If one of those four ways does not apply, then the player's salary is unguaranteed. What unguaranteed means is that the player is cut. The team is no longer responsible for paying them that much. Pretty simple. So, an unguaranteed salary, the only time the difference between guaranteed and unguaranteed matters is if the team no longer wants the player to be on the roster. If he's cut or he's traded, then the difference is here may come into play. So with Christian Involved Contract, for example, his first year salary and second year salary

2:06are both guaranteed salary. This is normal salary that is earned week by week. A team paid checks a week for an area of your NFL players. The team is just simply guaranteeing that salary. So if Christian Involved Contract is 20.26 and 20.27 is guaranteed. TJ Watts salary is guaranteed for 20.26 and 20.27. What that means is if the team cuts the player, they still have to pay them that money. Like Russell Wilson, when he got cut by the Denver Broncos, the Broncos still had to pay him. The player for the Atlanta Falcons this Sunday is still getting paid by the Miami Dolphins. So even if you cut that player, you have to keep paying him. But if you trade the player, the salary goes with the player to the new team. Because at the time of the trade, the player hasn't earned it yet.

3:10It's guaranteed it will happen, but it hasn't happened yet. So if the Steelers trade TJ Watts right now, all of his guaranteed salary goes with him to the new team, which is why it would be very difficult for the Steelers to train TJ Watts. Because here's a lot of guaranteed salary in this contract compared to his level of contribution last season. That's guaranteed salary. Then you have a signing bonus. Signing bonuses the more typical way to guarantee money. Signing bonuses are paid up front. That's why it's called the signing bonus. And for cap purposes, signing bonuses can be spread out over the length of the contract up to five years. But the cash goes to the player up front. So players like signing bonuses and teams like signing bonuses. This has been the signing bonuses by far the most traditional way to give a player guaranteed

4:16money and also the way the Steelers much preferring to business. The downsides of a signing bonus are that if you cut or trade the player early in the deal, that signing bonus that has not been accounted for against the cap that has already been paid to the player, now becomes a large dead cap. So you have players early in their deal get traded. They get traded for pennies on the dollar to the team coming in because the whole dead cap hit is staying with the team that signed them and paid it. The thing to remember about salary cap and trades is you can account for the cap in different ways. But at the end of the day, whoever pays a player the money, they're the team who has to keep the cap in. So some signing bonuses are paid out immediately.

5:17They always stay with the signing team. So signing bonuses do create some roster inflexibility. And also they are, they're inflexible. The only way you can make a signing bonus work is to spread it out evenly over the five years of the deal. So a team looking to backload a contract they can do with salary and they can do with guaranteed salary, but you can't front or backload a signing bonus. It has to be applied evenly throughout the contract in terms of the catback, it'll of course be paid in the first year. Signing bonuses do their nature are always considered guaranteed money. You get it as soon as you put your put into pay. So you have signing bonuses and you have guaranteed salary. Now, there's another guarantee where the salary is guaranteed for injury, meaning if the

6:20team, if the player is injured and the team cuts him because of that injury, they would still have to pay in the money. But this is almost never happened. And honestly, in the situations where it has happened to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the one I can think of Ryan Schaezer, they paid him anyway. That was not guaranteed for injury and they paid him anyway. So, but it does protect the player against suffering some sort of catastrophic injury where it's just done. The team doesn't want him anymore. And yeah. So that usually happens in some of these deals where like let's say they'll have two years of guaranteed salary and maybe that third year would be guaranteed for injury or something like that. Doesn't give the player a little bit more peace of mind. Case thing is, it's a significant injury, but that is the only time guaranteed for injury matters and in the play once a while.

7:24The final thing you have is what's called a rolling guarantee. This is a contract structure that has become more popular in the NFL recently. Patrick Mahomes is the player that immediately comes to mind when I think about a rolling guarantee contract. As someone that I don't think he was the first, but really his, not this last deal, but his first big money contract really popularized that format around the NFL. And TGLOT has some rolling guarantees, I believe, although the Steelers have not traditionally done a lot of business this way. The way a rolling guarantee works is when the contract is signed, future salaries are not guaranteed, but there will be trigger dates in the contract that say that future salaries will guarantee at a certain point. So, you know, let's just, for example, you can sign a deal with Julie Porter Jr.

8:24where his first two user guaranteed, and then his third year guarantees on the third league day, which would be March of his second year. And that's why it's called rolling because those guarantees usually vest a year before they are earned. So you have these, you know, situation where if you want to give the two months to get away from a play, if you want to avoid paying those guarantees, you have to make that decision a whole year ahead of time, basically. There's no easy out. So those are the kinds of guarantees. Now, when you are watching a report like yesterday, you'll see it come out, Christian and dollars signs a new deal, whatever it was, million, 102 million, 103 million guarantee. Unless they say fully guaranteed, that is going to be some gotcha wording from an agent that is inflating that total.

9:28Certainly some of those guarantees that are not fully guaranteed, the only things that are fully guaranteed are guaranteed salary and signing loans. The others, they come with caveats, right? The guaranteed for injury or a rolling guarantee, those would be included in a breakdown of like total guarantees, but not the fully guaranteed number. The fully guaranteed number is the one that really matters. And in the case of Christian as well, it's the reason that you didn't see it. The deal with the deal is not as high as what David Wittersman did. He did set the market in terms of the average annual value and he did set the market in terms of total contract guarantees, but his fully guaranteed number was a little bit less. And that is what I've been talking about for a long time here when it comes to the joy for a genuine miscontract situation. The stills will probably give some.

10:31They're not going to give everyone. And it seems like the thing that quarter wants is that fully guaranteed money, but he's not going to get the fully guaranteed money that would put him up there with the Trent McDuffies in the world in this, and those guys, I think that Duffy got 50 million fully guaranteed sauce and and stingy got, I think, 40 and 48. Maybe it was 42 and 48, very in the 40s, anyway. I mean, for him to get to the top of that line, that could happen, but then he's going to be down in the upper mid 20s and salad. And he could probably get 31 in salad, but then he's got to be down in low 40s and guaranteed. And so that sort of back and forth, I think, is if there is a deal to be made here where

11:32it's going to come, I don't think the Steelers are being especially unreasonable in the stance that they may be willing to move on one of those, but they're not going to move on both. And I haven't seen a willingness from quarter side of things to really move it on. So we'll see what happens over this last week. I did get also one more comment, and I feel like I've addressed this before about the Steelers not taking care of this early in the off season. It takes two people to make a deal. I don't think at any point there has been a lack of willingness from the Coast Guard Steelers to sign really for a junior. Nor do I think the offers the Steelers have made to join quarter junior have been unreasonable. That doesn't mean that he's wrong to be waiting for what he wants either, but the Steelers

12:37can't just make it go faster. Not in their own, they need him to be wanting to sign. And for most of this process, that was not the case. I think the greater potential benefit to waiting for other contracts to come out, lied with quarter, and it was pretty clear that he wanted to see what the others were going to get, although I don't think the numbers ended up helping him very much. And I don't think, like right now, I think the number that that Joey Porter junior and his agent would agree to at this very moment is if anything less than it was six months ago, probably a good bit less from being honest. Because the Steelers would have had to pay extra to buy away the uncertainty that maybe

13:38these other guys would not just set but blow the roof off the market. If this one came into 35 and then Gonzalez came in at 40, Porter's asked what a gun lay up. And I think that was within the realm of possibility. It didn't happen though. But to get him to sign in March, Steelers would have had to color him like that did happen even though it didn't. So yeah, the price has not gone up. If anything, it's probably going down. And it might go down a good bit more here in the final week as the sides try to get a build on. Oftentimes deadlines are the only thing that create urgency in getting people to move often numbers. And it's just the way negotiations work. Rushing them. You're going to pay if you want to rush. You're going to pay pretty dearly in a lot of cases.

14:39That's it for this morning. And some of the questions and stuff I feel like are personally suited to giving the full treatment here on the morning rush. And hey, if you don't care about contracts, just skip this one. Oh wait, I kind of told you one delay should have. Yeah. Normal Wednesday, as we move through our practice week heading to the south side right now, Brendan will have a practice report. I will have after the job is made. It's many Brendan and Job on night shift. Lodge at 9 p.m. And we'll do it all again tomorrow. That's it for now. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. Football is back. And so are the predictions who makes the playoffs. Who wins their division? Who takes home the title on call. Maybe America's number one prediction market platform it lets you trade those predictions in a live market. Maybe you like the Steelers in week two going to England. A hundred dollar trade pays out over three hundred dollars if they pull out the upset win on the road against last year's AFC championship patriots on call sheet.

15:41You're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. And as the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position. Save the draft pick the game and more on call sheet download the call sheet app and use code FFSN to get $20 when you trade $20 KAL S H I call sheet trade on anything. 18 and older only restrictions and eligibility requirements apply event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Call sheet products are not available in all jurisdictions prices values and available markets may differ from those mentioned for more information. See call sheet.com backslash regulatory.