After it was reported that Denver Broncos LB Elvis Dumervil would agree to take a pay cut to stay in Denver, things took a drastic change this afternoon. Dumervil and the Broncos had agreed to move his contract from $12 million to $7.5 million and push $3 million of it to 2015 guaranteed money. At 1:25 the Broncos organization was notified by Dumervil’s agent that he was going to accept the deal and stay with Denver.
So he agreed to the new contract but the new agreement had to be signed by 2 p.m. Unfortunately for Elvis Dumervil and the Denver Broncos, they were slow on getting the paperwork out, and by the time he got the contract signed and faxed back, it was past the deadline. According to Mike Klis of the Denver Post, Dumervil has now been released and is a free agent because of the debacle. They could theoretically re-sign Dumervil, but now there are cap implications such as dead money that cannot be used now.
Broncos didn't get fax with Elvis Dumervil signature on contract until 2:07 p.m. — 7 minutes and 1 second past the deadline!
— Mike Klis (@MikeKlis) March 15, 2013
This is a horrible, horrible miscue on the Broncos part. You have a lot of people working in the office that could have gotten the paperwork to him in time, so how do you let this happen? As great an offseason as the Denver Broncos and John Elway have had, Elway will take some flack for this. Just letting Elvis Dumervil walk because you didn’t get the paperwork done in time is highly embarrassing. Unless of course Elway did it on purpose and decided he didn’t want to pay Dumervil the money, which isn’t likely because it would give them a massive amount of dead money on the cap. Perhaps it was the agent who messed up, at this point it’s not really clear, but a colossal mistake was made.