A contract extension may not be coming for Detroit Lions linebacker Alex Anzalone, but the team has done a little something to sweeten the pot for him this year. According to ESPN's Field Yates, the Lions have added $250,000 to Anzalone's original $6 million base salary for 2025 and they've fully guaranteed the $6.25 million total.
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Anzalone's salary would have become guaranteed after Week 1, and now (per Yates) he also has some unspecified incentives to further bolster his potential pay in the final year of his three-year deal.
Anzalone has been blunt about his disappointment regarding the absence of a new contract to keep him in Detroit for a little while beyond the 2025 season. There seems to be no traction with those talks, but Anzalone did report to training camp on-time rather than be subject to daily fines that can't be voided by the team. He missed some early practices with a reported hamstring injury, but he returned to practice this week.
Alex Anzalone contract adjustment is much ado about nothing
A look at how the final year of Anzalone's deal looked before shows $100,000 in per-game roster bonuses ($5,882 per game) and a $150,000 bonus for playing at least 85 percent of the Lions' defensive snaps this season. So the team is rolling that total of $250,000 into his base salary, while guaranteeing the full total of $6.25 million.
As Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press noted, the base adjustment works out a little over a four percent raise (4.2 percent, upon doing the math) for Anzalone, which relatively speaking is not very much. And if he would have been presumed to collect most of that $100,000 in per game roster bonuses this year anyway, the practical raise he's getting lands as even more dismal.
Birkett also called the $150,000 incentive for playing at least 85 percent of the defensive snaps as "not likely to be earned." Based on Anzalone missing seven games last season, the label applies.
A little sweetener, but Alex was looking for a new contract. He already had $100k on the books in per-game roster bonuses and $150k in NLTBEs so this isn’t much if we’re being honest https://t.co/Gf6dgivAjc
— Dave Birkett (@davebirkett) July 31, 2025
Birkett has added some details, revealing the amount and nature of the incentives Yates first reported.
Ok, so some more details on Alex Anzalone and he did get more than a little sweetener. So Anzalone got the extra $250k to give him a full $6.25m guaranteed and he has $750k in playtime incentives he can reach. So he can make an extra million his year.
— Dave Birkett (@davebirkett) July 31, 2025
It's easy to question the legitimacy/severity of his hamstring injury, so Anzalone may have been staging a "hold-in" at the start of training camp. Fully guaranteeing that $6 million in base salary early means far more as a move to get him on the practice field than the little move to add to it, which only guaranteed him the full amount of money he would've been in line to earn most of as long as he stays healthy.
A possible total of $7 million this year, with that $750,000 in playtime (snap count) incentives, still lands Anzalone as underpaid compared to his similarly-accomplished linebacker peers.
With that in mind, and as Jeremy Reisman of Pride of Detroit said, this contract adjustment is probably not what Anzalone was looking for.
One way or another over the last few months, Anzalone has expressed his disappointment about his contract situation with the Lions. They've pacified him now, ahead of inevitably letting him hit the open market next March.
