Even when a team’s season is effectively over, there’s one thing that can often make Week 18 very interesting- player contract incentives.
Sometimes, hitting a statistical milestone can yield a fairly modest payday, but in many cases, it can be quite the substantive sum of cash.
Naturally, the importance of these incentives depends greatly upon the size of a player’s base salary.
A veteran making tens of millions of dollars a year might not be all that motivated by the opportunity to pick up a couple hundred thousand more, but for young players and even more-seasoned journeymen on smaller contracts, it can be a very big deal.
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Cooper Rush isn’t quite on a rookie contract, but he’s not making huge money in the scope of NFL quarterback deals.
His base salary for this year is just over 2 million dollars, so every extra bonus he can trigger is an important one for him.
He’s already hit some key benchmarks for snaps played, as starter Dak Prescott has missed lots of time with a major injury, but he came up short of another key threshold after being benched for the team’s season finale. However, team owner and general manager Jerry Jones claims that he didn’t make this decision for the purpose of saving the team some cash.
To quickly dive into the details, Rush did earn a $250,000 incentive for playing over 45% of the team’s offensive snaps this year, but playing Sunday’s game would have gotten him over 50%, doubling that bonus for a total of $500,000.
Jones claims that he had no idea that this was the case, and that he was really impressed by what third-stringer Trey Lance was able to do.
The Cowboys lost to the playoff-bound Washington Commanders, but Lance played turnover-free football and had a few nice runs with the ball.
One of two things is happening here. The first is that Jones is being dishonest, and he did know exactly what he was doing by pulling Rush for the last game of the year.
That’s not exactly what you want from your owner as a fan, and it’s certainly not the kind of leader that anybody wants to play for.
However, the other option is arguably more concerning. If a general manager doesn’t know what clauses go into his players’ contracts, he’s not doing his job.
This would put any other executive in line for a firing, but as Jones is at the very top of the organization as the owner and president, that’s not going to happen for him.
