Juju Smith-Schuster: Contract| Highlights| Did the chiefs sign

John Sherman “JuJu” Smith-Schuster is an American football wide receiver who is a free agent. He played college football at USC, and was drafted by the Steelers in the second round of the 2017 NFL Draft.

Juju Smith-Schuster: Contract| Highlights| Did the chiefs sign

Contract:

When news broke that the Kansas City Chiefs were signing former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster to a one-year, $10.75 million deal, the numbers made sense.

Despite being relatively cap-tight, the Chiefs could have freed up the necessary space with a procedural Patrick Mahomes restructuring, and roughly $11 million for one year wasn’t shocking for Smith-Schuster on a one-year deal.

In 2021, Smith-Schuster suffered a season-ending shoulder injury early in the year. Ultimately, he caught just 15 passes for 129 yards and zero touchdowns.

Highlights:

Therefore, if the Chiefs wanted to offer Smith-Schuster a deal packed with NLTBE incentives, they could do that at comically low numbers.

Perhaps — again, for speculation and exaggeration — the Chiefs will give Smith-Schuster $2 million for catching one touchdown, $2 million for hitting 130 yards receiving, and $1 million for catching 16 passes.

Those numbers feel too low and this whole exercise feels like exploiting an NFL loophole, but those would all technically be NLTBE incentives, meaning that the Chiefs wouldn’t “pay” Smith-Schuster that $7 million until the 2023 salary cap, even though the Chiefs and Smith-Schuster would both consider those incentives very likely to be earned on a practical level.

Did the Chiefs Sign:

Chiefs may not have gone quite that extreme and could have set incentives somewhere around the 40-catch/500-yard/five-touchdown mark (or even higher, in a more traditional incentive format).

It’s hard to imagine that Smith-Schuster would have any incentives in his new deal that would be considered LTBE, based on his injury-shortened season and corresponding statistics.

And, of course, there’s no guarantee that all of the incentives are practically likely, but for a hotly recruited free agent to agree to a deal that’s more than two-thirds incentives, it seems likely that the Chiefs got at least somewhat creative, helping them save a considerable amount of cap space in 2022.