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Football isn’t just a game of inches – sometimes it’s a game of seconds, or in Sean Rhyan’s case, a mere two snaps.
The Green Bay Packers offensive guard just came up agonizingly short of a massive payday that would’ve more than doubled his 2025 salary. Rhyan needed just two more offensive snaps over his first three NFL seasons to trigger a proven performance escalator worth an additional $2 million, per ESPN’s Rob Demovsky. Instead, he’ll earn just his original base salary of $1.36 million next season.
Talk about a tough break.
The proven performance escalator exists to reward later-round draft picks who outperform their rookie contracts. According to the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, players selected after the second round qualify for this raise in their fourth season if they play at least 35% of their team’s offensive or defensive snaps in any two of their first three seasons – or if they hit a cumulative average of 35% during that span.
Two Snaps That Cost Two Million
Rhyan, a third-round selection in the 2022 draft, finds himself stuck at 34.952% – just shy of the magical 35% threshold.
That’s not a typo. The 24-year-old guard played 1,144 snaps out of a possible 3,272 offensive plays over his first three seasons. Simple math shows just how close he came – two more snaps would have pushed him over the line.
His playing time breakdown tells the full story. After not seeing the field during his rookie campaign, Rhyan served as a backup in 2023, playing 183 of the Packers’ 1,096 offensive snaps (16.7%). Last season, he became a starter and logged 961 plays out of 1,082 (88.8%).
What makes this situation particularly brutal is that Rhyan was on track for the bonus before a collision with Detroit Lions linebacker Kwon Alexander in Week 4 forced him to miss nine snaps. He’d split time early in the season with rookie Jordan Morgan, but after Morgan suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in Week 9, Rhyan became a full-time starter.
Those nine missed snaps proved extremely costly.
“[We had] him at 35 percent of snaps exactly,” Cameron Foster, Rhyan’s agent, told ESPN. “However, the NFL and NFLPA both had him just under. So, per the Packers they are not giving him the escalator. We are pretty disappointed about it for sure.”
The confusion stemmed from Pro Football Reference data that showed Rhyan with 1,146 snaps – exactly 35% – but the NFL and NFLPA use their own official counts which came up just short.
You might think Green Bay could simply round up the percentage or make an exception given how close Rhyan came. Unfortunately, strict salary cap rules prevent such gestures. The NFL’s accounting doesn’t allow for rounding, and many contracts specifically prohibit it when calculating statistical incentives.
Rhyan’s focus now shifts to performing well in the final year of his rookie deal – a four-year, $5.12 million contract – and positioning himself for a bigger payday in free agency.
That won’t be easy either. He’ll likely face competition from a healthy Jordan Morgan for the starting right guard position.
Two snaps. Two million dollars. In the NFL, the difference between a windfall and a regular paycheck can be smaller than most fans realize.
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