NFL and Texans Miss Key Contract Error: How a $399,781 Mistake Slipped Through the Cracks

The NFL Management Council and Houston Texans missed a detail on the Ka’imi Fairbairn contract extension signed back in March. Yesterday, on September 23, the league office found the error and worked with the Houston Texans on correcting it.

In today’s post, I will break down what the error was and what it means.

This morning (September 24), I received a message from a trusted source that something was happening with the Houston Texans regarding the Ka’imi Fairbairn contract.

Post on X by @TexansCap

Simultaneously, I requested confirmation from the Houston Texans on the matter. The Texans Public Relations team confirmed the error, and the team would receive a salary cap adjustment for the 2024 league year.

A few hours later the news broke with some scant details from Mike Florio at ProFootball Talk.

Post on X by @ProFootballTalk

Full disclosure: I was already aware of the error. I found the mistake on March 17th when I received the contract details. I contacted Jason Fitzgerald (owner of OverTheCap), who confirmed what I discovered. I reached out to another contact, who confirmed the numbers were the same with the NFL Management Council as compared to the numbers I had. However, I couldn’t prove the mistake definitively at the time with another source, so I moved on with my work.

Before today’s news, I had applied the correction to Fairbairn’s 2024 salary cap figure both on my tracking spreadsheet and what is posted on Overthecap.com.

So what happened? To answer that, we need to go back in time.

October 5, 2023

Houston Texans and Ka’imi Fairbairn complete a basic restructure contract renegotiation by converting base salary to signing bonus. The new contract also included four (4) void years for salary cap purposes.