The Steelers have restructured Ike Taylor’s contract to free up cap space. The team was getting dangerously low in terms of cap room, so a restructure was a necessary evil to free up funds for possible injury replacements. The move creates an additional $1,488,236 in cap space for 2013. According to Ian Whetstone, the Steelers dropped his base salary to the vet minimum, and rolled the rest (apx $2.976 Mil) into a signing bonus.

Before the restructure, the Steelers were only about $247,000 under the cap. Isaac Redman’s salary of $ 1.323 Mil was fully guaranteed, and signing Kion Wilson cost the team a little under $330,000. Now, the team has $1,735,390 in cap space to operate with for the remainder of the 2013 season.

Ike Taylor’s numbers for 2013 and 2014 now look like this:

Year  Base Salary      Bonus           Cap Number   Dead Money
2013 $940,000       $4,942,401   $7,965,930    $9,884,805
2014 $7,000,000  $4,942,404  $11,942,404   $4,942,404