Earlier on Thursday, the Carolina Panthers decided to release veteran edge rusher Jadaveon Clowney.

As Rapaport’s report above states, the Panthers invested significantly in his position during the middle rounds of last month’s draft, adding both Nic Scourton and Princely Umanmielen to their edge rusher room. This, in their view, made Clowney surplus to requirements, at least at the money he was due this season.

Clowney signed a two-year $20M deal last off-season with Carolina, which included an $8M signing bonus and $2M in guaranteed salary in both 2024 and 2025. Even though Clowney has been released, Carolina will still be on the hook for $2M of his base salary in 2025, meaning they’ll only save $8M in cash this season rather than the full $10M if his base salary was entirely the typical non-guaranteed variety. With Carolina in a perfectly reasonable salary cap position now and the cap rising quite rapidly going forward, this move has little to do with cap implications, and more so that the Panthers don’t view Clowney to be a player worth $8M (because that is what they save by releasing him). Teams around the NFL do not view him as worth $10M, as that is what they’d have had to take on if they acquired him via trade. It appears no middle ground of Carolina paying a certain amount of that salary down to acquire a draft pick was reachable either, hence his release.

It’s worth noting how odd this is in the context of NFL pass rushers. $8M or $10M for a starting-caliber defensive end is generally going to be seen as a pretty good deal. That $10M Clowney was due is less than Joey Bosa, who has missed quite a few more games over the past half-decade, is due this year on a contract he just received in free agency. The number is virtually no different than other post-prime pass rushers like Demarcus Lawrence and Leonard Floyd have received. But Jadeveon Clowney is far from a “normal” player.

The obvious concern with Clowney is that his body has been on borrowed time since he got into the league. Early in his rookie season of 2014, Clowney suffered a torn meniscus, which then did not heal appropriately, leading to him undergoing the dreaded microfracture surgery later that year. This injury and subsequent surgery likely robbed him of ever reaching his true potential. Microfracture surgery has been a career-ending procedure for some players, and it’s frankly a minor miracle that Clowney has now been in the league, and has been productive, for a decade.

Clowney played the next couple season without major incident, but had knee clean-ups following both the 2016 and 2017 seasons. He then dealt with a core injury that required off-season surgery following the 2019 season. Since then, Clowney has not been exactly a clean bill of health, but he has only missed eleven total games over the past four seasons, for a variety of different bumps, bruises, and strains. The big concern for any team going forward likely stems back to those knees and just how many snaps are left in them. I cannot speak to that, but the medicals hang over the entire context of Clowney as a player now.

With that major caveat out of the way, what exactly is the former first round pick now? He has racked up 26 sacks over the past four seasons, including multiple nine sack seasons in that timespan. According to Next Gen Stats, Clowney is routinely posting pressure rates in the low-to-mid teens, with a 13.4% pressure rate last season on what was a pretty hopeless Panthers defense. Per PFF, among edge defenders who played at least 50% of pass rushing snaps, Clowney’s win-rate ranked 13th in the league. His 43 pressures off the edge ranked 33rd, and his pressure rate was nearly identical to Rashan Gary’s.

It is worth noting that Clowney has been playing fewer snaps as he ages, going from a player who played nearly 90% of snaps in Houston to playing closer to 60% of snaps the past three seasons. For a Packers team that likes to rotate their defensive ends with some regularity, this is unlikely to be a material problem. In his younger years, Clowney was a monster run defender holding down the edge, and that has waned some as he’s aged, but he still provides more stoutness there than current starter Kingsley Enagbare.

Speaking of Enagbare, he’s really the key here. Lukas Van Ness, Barryn Sorrell, and Collin Oliver are likely to be roster locks. Van Ness is a former first round pick, and the team just spent real draft picks on Sorrell and Oliver. That leaves Enagbare and late season pass rush specialist Brenton Cox Jr on the bubble, and Enagbare is in a unique contract situation. Due to his snaps played over the past few years, Enagbare received the Proven Performance Escalator, which increases his base salary from $985k last year to $3.4M this year. The downside of the PPE for Enagbare is that the salary is not guaranteed, so perhaps Green Bay comes to him and looks to lower than number, threatening release in the process. If Green Bay doesn’t want to pay Enagbare for sub-standard production (his 9% pressure rate only bested Preston Smith), he may not be long for the roster.

Since Clowney was seen as not worth $8M by Carolina or worth $10M by anyone else, it would seem probable that a contract for him would land somewhere in the mid-seven-figures, a mild increase on what Enagbare is currently scheduled to make. Now perhaps Green Bay looks to push Enagbare’s number down to $1.5M or $2M and views the savings versus paying Clowney $6M or $7M as worth it, but when it comes to quality pass rushers, you really can never have enough, and right now, it doesn’t look like Green Bay has near enough. From my seat, adding another starter-quality pass rusher to the room for just a few million dollars over what the team is currently scheduled to pay seems like a no-brainer… so long as the medicals check out just enough that you can get another 20 games out of those knees.