The Browns recently agreed to a revised contract with All-Pro edge rusher Myles Garrett, who saw his option bonus dates pushed back from the primary week of the league yr to the week before the regular season begins.
The adjustment makes it more financially feasible to trade Garrett. Any deal would must happen after June 1 to permit Cleveland to push a number of the resulting dead money into 2027. Previously, Garrett’s option would have triggered in March, adding one other $31.5MM in prorated cap hits to the Browns’ ledger and increasing the dead cap charges over $70MM, per OverTheCap. By pushing back the choice bonus date, the Browns could execute a post-June 1 trade with Garrett’s recent team taking up the payments (and cap hits).
But general manager Andrew Berry is maintaining his long-held stance that the team wouldn’t be trading Garrett.
“If we desired to trade Myles, we wouldn’t have needed to make a contract adjustment,” Berry said on Sunday (via ESPN’s Daniel Oyefusi). “So it doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
Technically, Berry is correct. The Browns could have left Garrett’s contract as-is and traded him after June 1, which might have left just over $21MM in dead money in 2026 with the opposite $59MM set to hit in 2027. They might see a rise in 2026 cap space with loads of time to regulate other contracts and budget for the remaining dead money the next yr.
But the brand new contract still makes those numbers significantly more favorable for Cleveland’s funds, that are already in a somewhat precarious state resulting from the Deshaun Watson deal, which is able to leave greater than $130MM in dead money when it voids next yr. Reducing the general amount of potential dead money from a Garrett trade is definitely price doing, if just for the flexibleness. Additionally it is price noting that the choice bonus payment dates were pushed back in each remaining yr of Garrett’s contract, which essentially preserves this flexibility for the remaining of the deal.
Garrett, though, has a no-trade clause. He was willing to make this alteration, which offers him some unknown advantages, likely referring to his payment schedule. His blessing would still be required for any kind of a trade, but this latest contract revision will make sure that such speculation will proceed to be an annual affair.