The Packers released cornerback Jaire Alexander earlier this week. It was presumed the team would spread out his dead cap hit over the next two seasons since he was a post-June 1 cut.
But Matt Schneidman of TheAthletic.com reports that the Packers are applying the full dead cap hit of $17.04 million to their 2025 salary cap. They had roughly $29 million in cap space before Alexander’s release.
“Over the last four years, there’s been a lot of games missed,” General Manager Brian Gutekunst said Tuesday, via Schneidman. “I just think for what that amount of money is, I think that’s a lot to pay for a guy who hasn’t been able to get on the field. Again, it’s not his fault. It’s just something that kind of transpired, so we just kind of were looking for something different.”
He played only 14 regular-season games the past two seasons combined. In 2023, shoulder and knee injuries, along with a one-game suspension for conduct detrimental to the team, limited Alexander to seven games. Last season, it was a knee injury that resulted in surgery on his PCL, costing him 10 games.
Alexander played less than 32 percent of the Packers’ defensive snaps in three of the past four seasons, and he has missed 38 games in his seven-year career.
The Packers offered Alexander a restructured contract, and they drew some trade interest, including reportedly from the Bills before the draft. But Alexander wouldn’t agree to a pay cut, which led the Packers to do what they did Monday.
“I think obviously, we’ve done that the past few years and it hasn’t really worked out for us,” Gutekunst said. “I think as we went through it, we went through a lot of different angles that might be right for the club and this is kind of where we ended up. Again, it was no bad blood. It was just kind of one of those things where over the last couple years, it hasn’t worked out exactly like we’d wanted to, through no fault of anybody. Just the injuries kind of took some games away from him.”
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