On Nick Allegretti’s contract, the Chiefs are saving $1.3 million against the cap

Mar 21, 2023 - 4:05 PM

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On Friday, we learned that the Kansas City Chiefs had re-signed free agent offensive lineman Nick Allegretti to a one-year contract. While contract details weren’t yet available, we speculated that Allegretti would receive a veteran salary benefit (VSB) contract.

As our Jared Sapp noted in his recent article about these kinds of deals — which general manager Brett Veach uses frequently — the Chiefs gave such a deal to backup offensive lineman Andrew Wylie in 2022, allowing the team to pay him $2.5 million, but have just $1.2 million charged against the salary cap.

That’s just the kind of move Kansas City would make for a player who has appeared in 57 games (starting 12 of them) in his four-year NFL career.

That speculation proved to be correct.

On Monday evening, NFL reporter Aaron Wilson reported the details of Allgretti’s new deal.

While Wilson didn’t specifically identify Allegretti’s deal as a VSB contract, the numbers he quoted clearly identify it as the special four-year player qualifying variant of a VSB deal. $2.43 million is exactly $1.35 million more than the NFL minimum salary for a player with four credited seasons — and $152,500 is the maximum amount of additional compensation that may be paid on any kind of VSB contract.

While a team can have as many as two of these special VSB contracts in a given year, it cannot claim more than $1.35 million in total cap relief from them. So just as they did with Wylie a year ago, the team has opted to execute just one of these in 2023, claiming the entire $1.35 million benefit on Allegretti’s cap hit.

Allegretti becomes the fourth Kansas City player to receive a VSB contract this season. According to Spotrac, center Austin Reiter, wide receiver John Ross and defensive tackle Danny Shelton have all been signed to normal VSB contracts, under which they are paid the NFL minimum for their experience but are counted against the cap as if they have only two credited seasons. Reiter and Ross’ contracts each save $140,000 against the cap, while Shelton’s contract saves $225,000.

Combined with the $1.3 million the Chiefs are saving against the cap on Allegretti’s new agreement, these contracts are saving Kansas City $1.8 million. It would not be unusual for the team to execute at least half a dozen more of these VSB deals over the course of this season.

The team currently has 57 players on the roster — and we estimate that the team now has $5.8 million in cap space.