Seven Cleveland Browns Players With $3 Million+ Non-Guaranteed In 2024 And What They Should Do With Them

Breaking News: More players With $3 millions Non-Guaranteed…..

Quite often in the NFL people view players through either a box score, how well they do in fantasy football, or how that player makes them emotionally feel

. The issue is to be a serial winner in the NFL you need to be cold, hard, and calculated. If you have Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes at quarterback then you can afford to make stupid decisions and both teams have on multiple occasions.

The Cleveland Browns aren’t in that luxury position. Jimmy Haslam is throwing money at the team like the league has never seen before outspending the league average at $50.5m a year over the last three years. While this is entirely sustainable as broken down here it is about maximizing the return on this money.

So in the spirit of this let us look at the seven players on the team who have over $3m of non-guaranteed salary on their 2024 contract and see what the team should do with them.

We aren’t going to be getting into players with fully guaranteed salary here as this involves a trade and those aren’t very likely or usually end up with the team moving off of them eating a large part of that guaranteed money to facilitate a deal.

we are focused on cash in this piece rather than salary cap number because cash is king, it is what the team is paying that player to play for them this season.

If a player has no guaranteed cash then they can be cut without a negative impact to the team. Andrew Berry has more than enough cap flexibility, I have written here for OBR VIP subscribers how he can create $84,889,974 of cap space with restructures if they need to.

We start off easy, he’s not going anywhere!

Most teams won’t extend a star player until two years remaining on the deal and then other players negotiations can begin with one year left. I don’t expect the front office to open negotiations with Garrett this offseason else it can lead to other players wanting the same in the future.

Making a clear rule that they aren’t willing to do a deal now is the right move, even if they have initial discussions about making him the highest-paid defensive player next year. They might not want to go too high as he will be 32 in 2027 when the first new year arrives.

While the cash number for 2025 is close to $20m it will increase with an extension so the increase in spending over the next few years on the salary cap will automatically go to Myles in terms of the defensive line.

How many years you add on that is guaranteed will be a tough negotiation point because you never know how someone will decline once they cross 30 so I would assume they maintain an out as you would rather go year to year on the tail end than promise a high number and lead to him getting cut because he can’t play up to it in his mid-thirties.

Coming into this season Moore, Peoples-Jones, Tillman and Bell had a chance to make a statement that they should be paid and open up more money for the rest of the position room. Entering the season 73% of the budget goes on Cooper and the other five share the remainder.

Cooper is by far the most talented wide receiver on the team, outside of him you have very little.

No one on the current roster is going to push him off it during the rest of the season so his only threat outside of injury is that they find other targets on the market and move to two of them rather than all the money in Cooper.

I believe this route is unlikely as Cooper is playing well enough you wouldn’t replace him for 2024.

The real question is what you do in the long term with Cooper as it is the final year of his contract. He will be 31 going into the 2025 season so it can be risky to extend him early if he will want multiple guaranteed years adding as well as big money.

I believe the best route to go is to allow him to see out the 2024 season and then late in that year or even after the season has completed go to him and see what he wants.

This gives more time for these young players to continue developing to see if they have something there.

I wrote here for OBR VIP subscribers what an early extension looks like.

Tags: Cleveland browns