Contract Notes: Bucs, Rodgers, Rudolph, Pats

We’ve got a handful of interesting notes on contracts to pass along, including for several quarterbacks:

• The Buccaneers’ quarterbacks room is a bit crowded now with Kyle Trask getting drafted in the second-round. One of Blaine Gabbert and Ryan Griffin will be the odd man out, since Bruce Arians won’t be keeping four signal-callers. “Their new contracts tell you who’s ahead” in the competition to hold Tom Brady‘s clipboard in 2021, Greg Auman of The Athletic tweets. Auman reports that Gabbert got $1.5MM in guaranteed money, $750K in base salary and a $750K signing bonus. On the other hand, Griffin only got a $75K signing bonus guaranteed. Gabbert has always been Bruce Arians’ guy, while Tampa’s front office has loved Griffin enough to keep him around since 2015. If these financial figures tell us anything, and they usually do, it’s that Gabbert will be back for the title defense while Griffin won’t be.
• The language of Aaron Rodgers‘ contract is going to get a lot of attention if his current beef with the Packers turns into a real holdout. Rodgers earned a $6.8MM roster bonus on the third day of the league year, but he hasn’t actually received that money yet since it’s to be “paid concurrently with his 2021 base salary,” former NFL agent and current CBS Sports analyst Joel Corry tweets. Corry notes that Green Bay has “the right to take fines & any recapture of signing bonus due to a training camp holdout from this money.” There was talk of Rodgers having to pay back that $6.8MM, but it turns out he hasn’t even gotten it yet. The Packers can start chipping away at that the moment he doesn’t show up for mandatory practices.
• One last quarterback note. Mason Rudolph recently got a one-year contract extension from the Steelers to keep him under team control through 2022, and it turns out the team gave him some real money. Rudolph’s new pact with Pittsburgh is worth $5MM for the 2022 season, which included a $2MM signing bonus, Mark Kaboly of The Athletic tweets. As Kaboly points out, Rudolph is the only passer the team has under contract for 2022. Rudolph hasn’t exactly looked like a franchise quarterback in his nine career starts, but with Ben Roethlisberger‘s status more than uncertain beyond this year, it makes since why the Steelers would want to make sure they have someone at least somewhat competent under center just in case.
• When Trent Brown got traded from the Raiders back to the Patriots, he reworked his contract from having two years and $29.5MM left to a one-year pact for $11MM. Turns out that new one-year deal has some interesting details. The massive offensive tackle’s contract has a series of weight-based incentives, Ben Volin of the Boston Globe writes. The 6’8 behemoth will have earned $150K if he weighed “385 pounds or less on the first day of the offseason program (April 19).” Brown will have an opportunity to earn another $150K if he clocks in at or below 375 pounds on June 1, and another $200K for 365 pounds on July 15. That’s a total of a half million bucks in weight-based incentives. Brown was with the Patriots for one season back in 2018, and won Super Bowl LIII with the team.