Originally posted on A to Z Sports | By Mike Payton | Last updated Jun 9, 2026 8:00 AM ET
Detroit Lions Kerby Joseph’s hypothetical medical retirement or release scenarios would both be wildly unlikely and don’t really help in the way you think they would.
Ok, I want to make it clear that I’m only doing this for educational purposes and because multiple Detroit Lions fans keep asking. This is not me reporting anything or even hinting at anything. Ultimately, I believe Kerby Joseph will play this season and beyond. I’ll believe that until I for sure see otherwise. But, here’s this:
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What happens to the Lions cap-wise if Kerby Joseph were to medically retire
If Joseph were to medically retire under his extension, it wouldn’t work the way you think. His contract doesn’t just go away. His base salary for future seasons would come off the books, so the Lions wouldn’t be paying out that non-guaranteed money anymore. But that’s not very much. His base salary is a bit over a million dollars each year until 2029.
The guaranteed money and the remaining signing bonus that’s already been prorated across the cap don’t just disappear. It either has to be paid out, depending on how the guarantees are structured, or, more importantly for roster building, it all gets accounted for on the salary cap immediately.
The key thing for fans to understand is this is not a cap-saving move. In a retirement scenario, the Lions would clear out maybe the future base salaries, but they’d simultaneously take on the remaining signing bonus as dead money, which basically offsets most of those savings. So instead of freeing up space, it usually just turns into a wash or a very small net gain or loss depending on timing. In other words, retirement helps the player situation more than the cap sheet. It’s not a way for Detroit to suddenly open up major money to spend elsewhere.
What if Detroit were to cut Kerby Joseph?
So this route is way less expected, and there’s basically no way it happens. But if it did, it’s a very different cap outcome than a retirement. In a standard release, the team does not get to avoid the remaining signing bonus proration that accelerates onto the cap immediately as dead money. So whatever portion of his signing bonus hasn’t yet hit the cap would all come due at once. At this stage of a big extension like his, that would likely land somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly $10M–$13M in dead cap, depending on exactly how the bonus was structured and how many void/prorated years are still active.
On the flip side, the Lions would still clear his future non-guaranteed base salaries, which is where the “savings” come from. That’s typically the larger number in the out years of a deal, so you could be looking at something like $15M+ in cap space in 2026. But once you subtract the dead money from the signing bonus acceleration, the end result doesn’t really look like huge savings. So basically, it will look like cap savings up front, but it’s really kind of a wash since there’s a heavy amount of dead money.
Again, both of these things probably won’t happen
I want to again reiterate that I don’t think either of these things will happen. Frankly, if they either did. There is just no win for the Lions involved. They’re stuck here, but until I’m told that Joseph is flat out done, which absolutley nobody with the Lions or the player himself is saying, then the belief is still very much that he takes the field Week 1 and keeps playing.
