I will pass this along to you, but I don\’t believe an ounce of it. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reports on Saturday that the Pittsburgh Steelers offered linebacker James Harrison a roughly 30 percent cut to his $6.57 million base salary with an opportunity to earn the money back via incentives prior to releasing him.
A 30% reduction equates to only $1.971 million and I have a hard time believing that the Steelers only wanted that low of pay cut from Harrison. That would have equated to a base salary in 2013 of $4.599 million.
Regardless of what the incentives were, which by the way would have had to have been NLTBE (Not Likely To Be Earned), that little bit of savings would have been about $1.5 million less than what the Steelers needed Harrison to earn in 2013. Keep in mind that $1.971 million would have been the cap savings as well.
Will Harrison find a team that will pay him more than $4.6 million a season now? Personally, I will be surprised if he does, but good for him if he is able to.
The cap economics tell you that the Steelers needed Harrison to take a pay cut of $3 million at the minimum. I also guarantee that if any incentives were offered to Harrison in addition to cutting his salary, that they would have been very tough for him to obtain. That\’s why they are called NLTBE.
