Cowboys

Cowboys Restructure QB Tony Romo’s Contract, Free Up $13M In Cap Room

April 1, 2015

Rand Getlin of Yahoo Sports reports that the Cowboys have restructured the contract of QB Tony Romo and in turn freed up close to $13 million in cap space.

Pro Football Talk reports that the Cowboys exercised their right to automatically convert $16 million of Romo’s salary to a signing bonus.
According to Todd Archer, this has been the plan all along since they signed DE Greg Hardy to a contract.
Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports reports that this move is not designed to make cap room to acquire RB Adrian Peterson from the Vikings.

It’s interesting that Romo reworked his contract now given that they could have used this money earlier in the offseason to re-sign players like RB DeMarco Murray.

In fact, Romo recently mentioned that he was willing to restructure his contract in order to keep Murray in Dallas next year.

“DeMarco ended up asking me, ‘Why don’t you take a pay cut?‘” Romo said during an appearing on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas on Tuesday, via ESPN.com. “I was like, ‘I will. I will take a pay cut to go do this.’ I was like, ‘They’re going to restructure me and the whole thing,’ that’s the same thing in some ways just for salary-cap purposes. He was like, ‘OK, now we’re back to being friends.’ ‘You’re really worried about me? I would take $5 million less if it meant getting you back’. He knew that.”

According to the most recent cap figures provided by the NFLPA, the Cowboys had just $2,090,944 in available cap space.

Romo, 34, still has another five years remaining on his seven-year, $119.5 million contract that included $55 million guaranteed. He has base salaries of $17 million (2015), $8.5 million (2016), $14 million (2017), $19.5 million (2018), and $20.5 million (2019) coming his way over the remainder of this contract.

In 2014, Romo appeared in 15 games and threw for 3,705 yards while completing 69.9 percent of his passes to go along with 34 touchdowns and nine interceptions. Pro Football Focus has him rated as the No. 6 quarterback out of 39 qualifying players.