4:45pm: Schwartz’s new deal also includes up to $500K in playing-time incentives, so he’ll have the opportunity to earn back the full $2MM he agreed to give up, tweets Raanan.
8:34am: After what amounted to a lost season, Geoff Schwartz has agreed to restructure his deal with the Giants, as Jordan Raanan of the Star-Ledger writes. The offensive lineman has given up a good deal in guarantees under his reworked deal with Big Blue.
The new pact will call for Schwartz scale back his base salary from $3.675MM to $1.675MM. He’ll get a chance to earn $1.5MM back in per-game roster bonuses and he’ll have $500K of his 2016 salary guaranteed. In essence, those two figures could combine to make up for the gap. In the end, the Giants will get a cap hit of $2.845MM for Schwartz in 2015, a lesser blow than what they were slated to pay out before, giving them $2.13MM in additional cap space for this league year. The Giants could use that extra breathing room to help facilitate new deals for Jason Pierre-Paul, Prince Amukamara or Eli Manning.
Schwartz, 28, signed a four-year deal with the Giants when he hit free agency in March, but he barely played for the club in 2014. Sidelined with a toe injury, Schwartz was placed on injured reserve with the designation to return prior to Week 1. The 28-year-old returned for November contests against the Cowboys and Jaguars, but that apparently was the beginning and end of his 2014 campaign.
Schwartz was a seventh-round pick of the Panthers in 2008 and made enough of a mark there to see time in all 16 games during his rookie season, including three starts. In his sophomore campaign, he started all 16 games at right guard. He went a couple of years without another start until 2013 with KC, which he used to springboard into his lucrative deal in New York.