The Buffalo Bills are stuck in salary cap hell this offseason; there’s no getting around it. Only the New Orleans Saints are in a worse situation than Buffalo, which is already more than $54 million over the 2024 salary ceiling, according to Spotrac. The Bills will need to make some tough choices in order to stay under the cap, but they can approach it by restructuring some of their larger contracts. Parting ways with Tre’Davious White, the former All-Pro cornerback who has recently been completely destroyed by injuries, may be one of those options. The Athletic’s Joe Buscaglia claims that removing White in order to free up contract money is a very real option.
“The first draft pick of the Sean McDermott era, White is now 29 and coming off two major injuries in three seasons — a torn ACL in 2021 and a torn Achilles in 2023,” writes Buscaglia. “Removing him would free up little more than $6 million in cap space, but there are other factors at play and the situation is more complicated than that. They adore the player and are waiting for White to recover before deciding. However, they might not have enough time before his $1.5 million roster bonus, which is due a few days into the new league year and would deduct 25% of their possible savings, expires.” To put it more precisely, by removing White, the Bills may free up around $6 million in salary space, but at the expense of about $10.4 million in dead money. Those figures would nearly reverse if they designated him as a post-June 1 cut, though. Since being selected in the 2017 draft, White, 29, has been an invaluable member of the Bills’ defensive line. Over the course of seven seasons, the LSU graduate has racked up 311 total tackles, 68 passes defended, and 18 interceptions.
But White’s highly promising career has been sidetracked by injuries in recent years. He missed the most of the 2021–2022 season due to an ACL tear that he sustained late in the season. Then, early in the 2023 season, he sustained a torn Achilles, which ended his season for the second time in three years.
In a perfect world, White would have avoided such awful injury luck and would have continued to be a Bills great for many years to come. It’s not an ideal world, though, and White’s tenure in Buffalo may end before it should due to the brutal realities of the NFL.
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