As they have with both Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders, the Detroit Lions forced retired Frank Ragnow to return a portion of his remaining signing bonus.<\/p>\n
A quick recap of what that means. Ragnow signed a contract extension in 2021 that included a $6 million signing bonus. That signing bonus is paid immediately to the player, but it only counts against the cap an even amount over the length of the contract. In Ragnow\u2019s case, the $6 million hit $1.5 million against the cap in each year from 2023-26. Once he retired in 2025, there were still two prorations left to hit the cap ($3 million in total), and per the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the team can recoup all of those remaining hits.<\/p>\n
But the Lions have been pretty consistent with their policy. After arbitration, Sanders was forced to repay over $7 million of his signing bonus. The Lions also forced Johnson to repay $1.6 million of the $3.2 million Detroit could have recouped. Both Sanders and Johnson were at odds with the franchise for several years after their retirement at least partially because of the team\u2019s decision to recoup that money.<\/p>\n
Wood didn\u2019t give specifics on how much they opted to recoup from Ragnow, but he defended the decision, stating team precedent and insisting that money is the team\u2019s, not the player\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur precedent goes all the way back to Barry Sanders,\u201d Wood said. \u201cAnd if Barry Sanders paid back money. \u2026 And I think the reality is, they\u2019re not paying back their money, they\u2019re returning our money. Cause they were paid in advance for services that they hadn\u2019t completed.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear if this decision will alienate Ragnow as it did with Sanders and Johnson. Though, it\u2019s certainly worth noting that Ragnow did attempt to come out of retirement late last season to rejoin the team before a physical revealed an injury that ended his season. Since his retirement, Ragnow has stayed completely out of the public eye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As they have with both Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders, the Detroit Lions forced retired Frank Ragnow to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[4992,349,99],"class_list":["post-556313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-detroit-lions-news","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}