Buffalo Rumblings
Who can the Bills restructure ahead of the 2025 NFL season?
Entering the 2025 offseason, the Buffalo Bills face critical roster decisions. NFL teams must have their top 51 players under the salary cap by the start of the new league year, which begins on March 12 at 4 p.m. EDT.
With the NFL’s salary cap projected somewhere between $277.5 million and $281.5 million (per Dan Graziano), the Bills are currently and approximately $10.5 million over the cap.
Looking over the Bills’ 2025 salary cap situation reveals several potential moves to clear cap space. As we know, organizations can release players, restructure a player’s contract, trade a player, and extend eligible players – any and all of those moves could potentially result in current cap savings, but almost all moves also carry with it dead cap.
Today in part three of this series, we will look at some different contract restructure options available to the Bills.
Catch up with previous installments in this series:
Part 3: Potential Buffalo Bills roster restructures
To address the cap overage, the Bills may consider restructuring several veteran players. This drops the player’s current base salary to anything above the veteran minimum and divides the rest into equal amounts as a signing bonus. Because the signing bonus needs to be allocated over the remaining years of the contract the player must not be in their last year of their contract. If a player is in their last year an extension (including void years) would have to be considered.
Realistically, if the Bills make a major roster cut (such as Von Miller) and secure a few extensions, most of the restructuring will be a “only when needed” scenario.
The Bills will work on extending Allen, but they of course would never want this to affect the season. So if an extension cannot be reached this offseason, they would most likely restructure Allen and table the extension until next season.
Restructuring Ed Oliver and Dion Dawkins seem like easy answers as they’re not going anywhere and they have several years left on their current contracts.
Most people are ready to move on from Milano, but unless it is a post-June 1 designation there is no money to be saved. The bigger possibility here, if he’s unwilling to negotiate a pay cut, is...
