Acme Packing Company
The former first overall pick provides the best route for strengthening 2024’s most disappointing unit.
Earlier on Thursday, the Carolina Panthers decided to release veteran edge rusher Jadaveon Clowney.
As Rapaport’s report above states, the Panthers invested significantly in his position during the middle rounds of last month’s draft, adding both Nic Scourton and Princely Umanmielen to their edge rusher room. This, in their view, made Clowney surplus to requirements, at least at the money he was due this season.
Clowney signed a two-year $20M deal last off-season with Carolina, which included an $8M signing bonus and $2M in guaranteed salary in both 2024 and 2025. Even though Clowney has been released, Carolina will still be on the hook for $2M of his base salary in 2025, meaning they’ll only save $8M in cash this season rather than the full $10M if his base salary was entirely the typical non-guaranteed variety. With Carolina in a perfectly reasonable salary cap position now and the cap rising quite rapidly going forward, this move has little to do with cap implications, and more so that the Panthers don’t view Clowney to be a player worth $8M (because that is what they save by releasing him). Teams around the NFL do not view him as worth $10M, as that is what they’d have had to take on if they acquired him via trade. It appears no middle ground of Carolina paying a certain amount of that salary down to acquire a draft pick was reachable either, hence his release.
It’s worth noting how odd this is in the context of NFL pass rushers. $8M or $10M for a starting-caliber defensive end is generally going to be seen as a pretty good deal. That $10M Clowney was due is less than Joey Bosa, who has missed quite a few more games over the past half-decade, is due this year on a contract he just received in free agency. The number is virtually no different than other post-prime pass rushers like Demarcus Lawrence and Leonard Floyd have received. But Jadeveon Clowney is far from a “normal” player.
The obvious concern with Clowney is that his body has been on borrowed time since he got into the league. Early in his rookie season of 2014, Clowney suffered a torn meniscus, which then did not heal appropriately, leading to him undergoing the dreaded microfracture surgery later that year. This injury and subsequent surgery likely robbed him of ever reaching his true potential. Microfracture surgery has been a career-ending procedure for some players, and it’s frankly a minor miracle that Clowney has now been in the league, and has been productive, for a decade.
Clowney played the next couple season without major incident, but had knee clean-ups following both the 2016 and 2017 seasons. He then dealt with a core injury that required off-season surgery following the 2019 season. Since then, Clowney has not been exactly a clean bill of health, but he has only missed eleven total games...
