Earlier this week, contract details on the Detroit Lions’ re-signing of Malcolm Rodriguez came out, and if you were to just look at the Over The Cap outline of the deal, it would probably be pretty confusing.

Rodriguez has a salary of over $2.5 million—all guaranteed—a signing bonus of $137,500, and a workout bonus of $50,000. Combine all of those, and it should equal a salary cap hit of a combined $2.7 million. Yet, per OTC, the Lions’ cap charge for Rodriguez’s deal is just $1,402,5000.

There are no void years. This isn’t a misprint. The Lions are just using a salary cap stipulation that rewards teams for developing players and staying loyal to them.

How to qualify for the Four-Year Player Qualifying Contract

The relevant Collective Bargaining Agreement rule is called the “Four-Year Player Qualifying Contract.” You can read the entire terms of this rule, but here’s the short of it. In order to qualify for this advantage, a player has to have:

Four or more Credited Seasons whose contract with a Club has expired after four or more years of continuous, uninterrupted service with that Club

In Rodriguez’s case, he played through the entirety of his four-year rookie contract, so both he and the team are certainly eligible for this benefit.

What is the actual benefit?

Essentially, a team can award a one-year contract to these players that acts as a veteran minimum salary deal when it comes to the overall cap hit, but they are able to increase these players’ salaries from the minimum by a fixed number that will not count against the cap.

In Rodriguez’s case, the veteran minimum for a player with four accrued seasons is $1,215,000. According to the CBA, for the 2026 season, the “Four-Year Player Qualifying Contract” can increase the salary by a maximum of an extra $1.55 million.

So if you look at the actual cap hit, it’s based on that veteran minimum salary:

Vet minimum salary: $1,215,000
Signing bonus: $137,500
Workout bonus: $50,000

Add those together, and you get $1,402,500—Rodriguez’s cap hit for 2026.

But the actual payment Rodriguez will be getting in 2026 is this:

Actual salary: $2,562,500
Signing bonus: $137,500
Workout bonus: $50,000

For a total of $2,700,000 in earnings. In short, the Lions are saving nearly $1.3 million by using this salary cap tool. And for Rodriguez, the benefit is that everything but the workout bonus is guaranteed. Note that no player is obligated to accept this kind of contract, but for a player like Rodriguez, who is coming off an injury-shortened season, it’s a nice little guaranteed payday that he may not have been able to get elsewhere. And for the Lions, it’s a way to pay a player his value while also getting some savings on cap space.

This isn’t the first time the Lions have used this cap trick. They used it with Jalen Reeves-Maybin back in 2021, and they’ll likely use it again.