Veteran defensive end John Franklin-Myers took a pay cut to facilitate a trade from the Jets to the Broncos last week, but he says that pay cut was better than what the Jets would have wanted him to give up if he had stayed.
Franklin-Myers had been slated to make $13.3 million from the Jets for the 2024 season, but there was no way the Jets were going to pay that. The Jets would have cut Franklin-Myers if they hadn’t found a trading partner or convinced him to take a pay cut, and Franklin-Myers says the two-year, $15 million deal the Broncos gave him was far better than anything the Jets offered.
Responding to a social media post asking why he didn’t just take the two-year, $15 million contract with the Jets, Franklin-Myers wrote, “They didn’t offer me anything close to this.”
In other words, if Franklin-Myers was going to stay with the Jets, they were going to insist he take a much steeper pay cut. Understandably, Franklin-Myers didn’t want to do that.
Franklin-Myers could have simply refused to renegotiate and told the Jets to cut him, but the problem with that strategy is that the Jets might have dragged their feet and waited until closer to the start of the season to cut him, and by that point the Broncos and any other teams interested in his services might have addressed their defensive line needs elsewhere. By signing with the Broncos now, Franklin-Myers locks in at least the $4 million in guarantees he’s getting from the Broncos over the next two seasons.
It’s the reality of life in the NFL that sometimes veteran players are willing to take a pay cut to get a trade done now, rather than get cut later and end up with even less.
