Last Sunday, Rams receiver Odell Beckham Jr. suffered a non-contact ACL tear during the first half of the Super Bowl, after catching two passes for 52 yards and a touchdown. Beckham will be a free agent in less than a month. Given his looming rehab and the amount of time required to return from the same injury in the same knee (suffered against the same team) in 2020, Beckham won’t be getting a major contract on the open market.
The Rams should sign Beckham to a fair contract that gives him additional compensation for his role in late-season Super Bowl run (it wasn’t insignificant), especially since the non-contact knee injury happened on the team’s home field, which was specifically designed to use artificial turf and not grass. But the Rams aren’t legally required to do anything. In theory, OBJ could be SOL.
He may not be. The Collective Bargaining Agreement provides injury protection for players with non-guaranteed salaries in the season after they suffer an injury that prevents them from playing. (More limited benefits are available for the second year after the injury is suffered.)
Ordinarily, a player with an expiring contract is not eligible for injury protection. Beckham signed a one-year deal with the Rams after being released, at his request, by the Browns. However, there’s an unresolved question that would be relevant to Beckham. When he suffered the injury, he technically had a contract with future years remaining. Yes, those future years were a device for spreading cap money and will automatically disappear. Still, at the time he tore his ACL, Beckham had a contract beyond 2021.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, there’s a pending arbitration between the league and the union as to whether injury protection applies in situations like this. If it does, Beckham will be entitled to compensation for 2022, even if he’s not cleared to play at any point during the season — and if the Rams don’t sign him to a contract that recognizes his contributions and sacrifices toward the effort to win a Super Bowl.
The Rams arguably anticipated this possibility. Beckham’s base salary for 2022 is only $1.12 million. (Injury protection is available up to $2 million.) Thus, even if he can’t play in 2022, he’ll get another $1.12 million, if the legal question of eligibility for injury protection is resolved in favor of players with voidable years remaining on their deals.
The best news for Beckham is that he earned the full $3 million in team-based incentives arising from his Rams contract. Some have said he best on himself. That’s incorrect; he bet on his team, and (with his help) the team delivered by winning the Super Bowl and, in turn, delivering the full $3 million package for Beckham.
Voidable years could make Odell Beckham Jr. eligible for injury protection under CBA originally appeared on Pro Football Talk