Saturday, February 9, 2008

Pork Chop.... TD Threat!

John Clayton reported this morning on KJR that the Seahawks reworked 8 million dollars worth of "LTBE" incentives into Chop's contract.

I mentioned this before, and now is as good a time as any to explain it.

LTBE stands for Likely to be Earned. Because that type of incentive is "likely" to be reached it counts against the cap. However, what makes an incentive likely to be earned. Well, the incentives that are "likely" to be earned are designated by the current collective bargaining agreement. Often, these are common incentives, such as yards, touchdowns, completion rate, etc. If these incentives aren't reached, the team is credited the money back at the beginning of the next year.

So here is how it works to teams advantage, with the Seahawks and Pork Chop as a perfect example. Hypothetically, if the Hawks redid Chop's deal with an LTBE incentive that if he would catch 5 touchdown passes he would earn 8 million dollars. This is what the Seahawks had left over at the deadline to count money towards last year. Now touchdowns are likely to earned by most, hence there designation as LTBE, just not so much for backup lineman. So, because Chop, love him as we do, is no Mike Vrabel, the Hawks get an 8 mil cap credit this year. Do we get that whole 8 million??? If you look in the offseason preview we talked about how the Hawks got 3.3 last year, and i conservatively estimated at 2.5 this year. Well that number might go up now, but not all the way to 8 mil.

Why???? Because players also have incentives that aren't designated as LTBE incentives and these don't count against the cap. However, when players reach them, we pay them out of this years cap.

Get it, Got it, Great. I hope you are pickin' up what i am putting down!