NFL GMs don’t operate out of the goodness of their hearts.
A team won’t hesitate to cut a player. Cold, calculated decisions are made on the daily.
NFL players, likewise, aren’t interested in charity when it comes to their employer.
Clubs try to pay players as little as they can. Players try to earn as much as possible.
Thatap the way the business works 99% of the time.
Thatap also what made the news earlier this month that the Broncos had given Pat Surtain II a $5 million raise — and added a 2027 escalator worth another $5 million if Surtain makes the Pro Bowl or an All-Pro team this fall — interesting.
It was a smart move by the Broncos, even if it wasn’t done out of pure grace.
Surtain knew he was underpaid after a boom in the cornerback market since he signed an extension in September 2024. So did Broncos officials. There was really no reason to play hardball with a guy the club is likely hoping plays another 7-10 years on the Front Range and retires a Bronco and a future Hall of Famer.
Surtain is 26 years old. He’s going to be due for a monster extension in the next 12-24 months anyway. Why risk souring the relationship now, just as the roster around Surtain has blossomed into a Super Bowl contender?
It looks from here like good employee management on the front office’s part to bump Surtain up this year — and likely next year, too, as long as he’s mostly healthy this fall. A four-year, $96 million extension signed in 2024 essentially becomes four years and $106 million, setting Surtain up to cash in again before too long.
There’s another key to the raise, though, and itap a very simple one.
The Broncos did it because they could. They started the week more than $25 million under the salary cap, and even after giving Surtain a raise, they can easily absorb another contract if they wanted to add a veteran this summer, add at the trade deadline this fall — or both.
“He’s obviously someone that we feel like is elite and at the top of his position,” head coach Sean Payton said Thursday, explaining why Surtain got a raise without a new deal. “Part of that is the salary cap and how that fluctuates and moves, especially in the last three years.”
As it pertains to Denver, specifically, the Broncos have worn $85 million in dead cap for Russell Wilson alone over the past two seasons. Now they head into 2026 with among the cleanest books in football. They have newfound flexibility and are putting it to use.
There is still plenty of roster maneuvering, cap management and future planning to do, however.
First, Denver will likely want to get back to rolling over a fair chunk of cap space year to year. They’d made a practice of it under George Paton until cutting Wilson. The past two years, they’ve rolled over less than $1 million. Before that, Paton was consistently rolling between $5-10 million over per year.
The Broncos’ use of option bonuses as a contract tool likely plays into their approach this offseason, too.
Option bonuses give a club flexibility on how it accounts for a player’s pay. Remember, base salary counts against the cap in the current year, whereas bonus money can be prorated over up to five seasons. Teams regularly convert base salary to bonus to lower a player’s current-year cap number and push cap charges down the road. Option bonuses basically let teams decide how to handle those decisions as they go.
Under Paton and vice president of player administration Rich Hurtado, the Broncos have used option bonuses with more frequency as they’ve locked up more than 10 core players on major extensions in the past two years.
Teams like option bonuses in part because, the way the CBA is written, the default assumption is that each option will be exercised and the money will be accounted for as a bonus. So teams get the flexibility of the proration built in until the option date, then can decide whether to actually use it.
Thatap a bit of a mouthful, so an example might be cleaner: Broncos receiver Courtland Sutton has a $12 million option bonus this year due Sept. 1. The money is guaranteed, so he’s getting paid no matter what Denver does.
Currently, that $12 million is accounted for as $2.4 million on the cap for this year and each of the next four. Add the $2.4 million to Sutton’s $4.735 million base salary, $6.075 million of prorated signing bonus and $765,000 in per-game roster bonuses, and you get his 2026 cap number of $13.975 million.
On Sept. 1, Denver can leave that just the way it is. But the team could also rescind the option bonus in total or in part. The Broncos’ options usually allow them to choose between prorating all, half or a smaller portion (around a third) of the bonus amount. So, if Denver rescinded the entire bonus, Sutton’s base salary would jump from $4.375 million to $16.375 million. His cap number would balloon from $13.975 to $23.575 million this year, but the Broncos wouldn’t have $9.6 million in future-year prorated bonus money on their books.
The Broncos did this in part with Garett Bolles last year, prorating out $6 million of his option bonus but rescinding some of it and bumping his base salary to $10.235 million and his cap number to $13 million.
Bolles, like Sutton, has an option bonus due Sept. 1 this fall. His is $16.935 million.
So, put it this way: Bolles and Sutton could eventually count a combined $22.43 million against Denver’s cap in 2026. But they could also count $45.58 million. Or somewhere in between.
It just depends on whether the Broncos want the cap room now or want to increase their flexibility in future years. Some teams, like Philadelphia, use option bonuses aggressively and basically always exercise them. Kick the money down the road. As long as the cap keeps going up each year, a dollar on the cap is cheaper in the future than it is this year. Itap a bet that there’s not another surprise downturn like the COVID-impacted years coming around the corner.
There’s an argument to be made that if a team can choose between counting money on the cap this year or in the future, it should choose the future every time. The pandemic happened, though. Itap not impossible for the cap to drop or stagnate. Payton in New Orleans was part of a group that spent years walking the tightrope and prorating aggressively. It mostly worked until the pandemic. Now itap taken years and years of roster slashing and money burning in a straitjacket to unwind the mess.
The Broncos are aggressive but have demonstrated a somewhat lower-than-maximum risk tolerance.
The older a player is, the more likely Denver will at least consider rescinding an option bonus and taking more of the money on the current year cap.
Sources also indicate that internally, the Broncos generally treat option bonuses as if they’re going to rescind them. So, they don’t necessarily look at Sutton as a player with a $13.975 cap hit this year. They look at him as a player with a $23.575 million cap hit that they can choose to lower by exercising the option on Sept. 1.
The CBA assumes the flexibility and the league credits Denver with around $21 million in cap space after Surtain’s raise. But the Broncos enter the summer likely working under their own internal assumption that they have less room than that.
Now that the team’s built a stable of players with option bonuses in their deals, it can treat them essentially like puzzle pieces. Exercise a couple here, rescind a portion there. Manipulate cap space and associated risk on a per-player, per-year, per-option basis.
Itap complicated, itap interesting, and itap the way the front office has decided to attack a future that could, as soon as next summer, include a mega-contract for quarterback Bo Nix.
Every team’s calculus changes once it pays a quarterback. But from this far away, itap impossible to say exactly what that might look like, how fast the cap will grow, how players at other positions will age and what position might go from strength to weakness or vice versa.
As such, the Broncos are trying to set themselves up with as much flexibility as possible.
It means you can pay a star player what he’s worth in the present and maybe, just maybe, keep an extra quality player or two down the line.
