As the Chiefs finish the third straight season of playing as late into the calendar as possible, they once again have limited time to take care of early-offseason business.

At the top of the stack is the future of tight end Travis Kelce, whose retirement would create both a giant hole in the starting lineup but $17.3 million in cap space.

Not far beneath Item A is the contract of Patrick Mahomes. Now that he’s getting deeper into his ultra-long-term half-billion-dollar deal, the cap numbers are going up. For 2025, it moves to $66.258 million.

They’ll need to chop it down. They surely will.

Before the 2023 season — and after Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow signed a then-record deal — the Chiefs reworked Mahomes’s contract to ensure that his cash flow exceeds all others (as of June 2024) in the four years from 2023 through 2026 and the four years from 2024 through 2027.

The simplest path to reducing the Mahomes cap number comes from a simple restructuring. His total 2025 compensation of $49 million (plus a $1 million workout bonus) could be shifted to a guaranteed payment, with his base salary dropped to the minimum of $1.255 million.

By giving him a $47.745 million dollar restructuring bonus and spreading it over five years, Mahomes’s 2025 cap burden would be $11.8 million. Coupled with past bonuses, his cap number for 2025 would be $28 million.

It would be a temporary fix, of course. The revised deal would bump his 2026 cap number to $78.213 million. Next year, they could do the same thing with his $55.75 million in salary and roster bonus.

But kicking the can goes only so far. Every time future cap dollars from current cash payments are pushed forward, the cap burden moves to future years. If the cap keeps going up and up (as it likely will), it works. Still, at some point, the allocations in a given year from the constant restructurings will be unavoidable. Minimizing the cap number in any/every given year comes with an eventual bill. For most teams with long-term franchise quarterbacks, there’s an inevitably gigantic cap charge that hits the cap the year (or two) after the player retires or leaves.

The Chiefs surely have a meticulous long-term plan for managing Mahomes. It’s part of the burden of having one of the best quarterbacks in league history on the team for eight years and counting, with at least (ideally) eight more after that.

The bigger problem for the Chiefs will be ensuring that the deal is periodically revised to keep Mahomes fairly close to the top of the market. At some point, the balance of his current deal will need to be torn up and replaced.

Still, the annual restructurings won’t erase the cap charges. The efforts to shrink the current year cap number will simply add to the cap bill that will come due when he’s no longer on the team.

The easiest way around this, of course, would be to tie the franchise quarterback’s total annual pay to a percentage of the cap. Every year, he gets the same sized slice of pie. With, say, 17 cents of every dollar going to the starting quarterback, the other 83 cents would go to the rest of them.

More importantly, the residual cap burden after the franchise quarterback leaves would be zero dollars, zero cents.