Schefter says Warner has earned a $500,000 bonus for getting the Cards to at least a wild card spot. He has met all playing time incentives and can earn another 2 mil in bonus mone if we get to the NFC Championship. Congrats Kurt. Now, no more turnovers or we will banish you to the bench!
That money would go toward this years cap, right?
No. It will go on next year's cap, sadly, unless something is going on that I'm not aware of.
Bonus money is assigned to the cap based on whether or not it is considered to be "likely to be earned". (LTBE) Whether or not it's LTBE depends on the previous year's results. So, a bonus for making the playoffs would not be LTBE because the Cards didn't make the playoffs last year, and wouldn't have been applied to this year's cap. When it
is earned, it's still not applied to this year's cap, it's applied to next year's cap. (This is to avoid situations in which a player earns a bonus and puts his team into salary cap violation.)
It works the other way around, too. If a bonus is considered LTBE, it's applied to that year's cap. If it's then
not earned, the money that wasn't paid out becomes a credit on the next year's cap.
You get all sorts of weird machinations with this in contracts to allow teams to accelrate or delay the cap hit of money paid out to their benefit.
