Marvin Jones Jr.’s contract details with the Lions revealed

When Marvin Jones Jr. re-signed with the Detroit Lions, it was originally reported as a 1-year deal worth $3 million with a chance to reach $5 million with incentives. Now that the contract details have been released in full, as is true in most cases, the structure of the deal reveals it’s a bit more team-friendly than originally reported.

Here’s how the contract breaks down. Jones has a fully guaranteed base salary of $1.4M, along with a $1.6M prorated signing bonus that is spread evenly over the 2023 and 2024 seasons, via a voided year added onto his contract.

In total, he has $3M guaranteed, but because of the voided year, only $2.2M of his contract is counted against the 2023 salary cap, and the remaining $800,000 is pushed into 2024.

Here’s a visual overview of the contract:

Details surrounding the reported incentives that could increase Jones’ contract up to $5M were not provided, but the fact that they are not included as part of his 2023 cap number indicates that they are most likely of the “not likely to be earned” (NLTBE) variety. This means that if Jones does hit the markers that trigger the incentives, the cap hit of those incentives will likely be part of the 2024 offseason adjustments and will count toward the 2024 salary cap.

As previously reported following the Jeff Okudah trade, the Lions were projected to have roughly $26M in available cap space for the 2023 season. Factoring in that it will cost around $16M-$18M to sign the Lions draft class, plus the practice squad, as well as an in-season operating budget for spending, the Lions still have a comfortable amount of salary cap room to operate moving forward.