The management side…
This may be the most likely and unfortunately for Eagles fans, most boring by comparison. Howie Roseman is a mastermind when it comes to the Salary cap, but it doesn’t mean he’s immune from its restrictions, ones that only pull harder whenever Roseman appears to push away.
Because every ‘Roseman worked deal’ follows the same trait, what we often see is that the Eagles will end up swimming even more desperately against the salary cap tide with each season that passes. The deals are all structured with longevity in mind, giving players more money each season they spend with the team. This gives the Eagles some immediate cap relief to make more moves, before ultimately encountering windows like the one Roseman is currently working through.
What Howie Roseman does is essentially sign a key player to a long-term deal with a huge signing bonus in order to lower the base salary. As that base salary then increases in conjunction with other moves and production, Roseman opens a restructure that will either add ‘dummy years’ to help spread the cost of said deal or turn the majority of that salary into a bonus that can be paid over the remainder of the deal.
But if we’re to now look at the contracts of those cornerstones from a few years ago, (namely, Zach Ertz, Lane Johnson, Fletcher Cox) what we see is that Roseman is going to have to paddle even harder to cough up the money he’s now backloaded.
Lane Johnson is set to make $800k in 2019, counting for $7M of cap utilization. That number then doubles next season. Ertz faces a nearly identical rise.
Fletcher Cox will count for $11M in 2019 and if the Eagles do decide to take the potential out, they will avoid paying Cox a whopping (and thoroughly deserving) $24M in 2020.
So it’s all well and good that the Eagles have $27M in cap space…but when you take into account the rookies of 2019 and trying to keep all of the aforementioned and then some aboard, he’ll need every last penny.
We may see a Carson Wentz extension, we may see a big signing. But the biggest move of all would be to just keep swimming and fighting the currents in order to keep this team
