re: So the Eagles may be trading Mychal Kendricks

To be more accurate we did not fix the "problem" of backloading and we actually did more of it this year and will again in the future. What we did fix was the problem of overpaid players in their last year or two of their contracts(with pay cuts, cuts, and trades), which is actually why backloading is beneficial.

Just to give an example, Lofton's contract averaged $5.5m per year and was heavily backloaded. He wound up earning less than the $5.5m per(I think it was closer to $4m per but don't have the numbers presently).

Now had we not backloaded, or even worse frontloaded, we would have paid him more than we wound up doing. The ONLY benefit to not backloading is it makes it easier to keep a borderline player. We may have kept Lofton at $5.5m. Would that have been the right call? Hard to say.

Another benefit to backloading is planned obsolescence. What I mean by that is we pay a player less in his younger (and usually better) years and as he gets older and his contracts swells we ask them to take a pay cut or get cut/traded. In that scenario the team has great leverage as the player is rather worth what his cap is(see Hawthorne, Bunkley, Evans, and Colston this year as pay cuts and Lofton and Grubbs as cuts/trades).

In the NFL backloading is THE way to go and that's why pretty much every contract is done that way. Only reason not to do so is if you are in a bidding war for a player and are giving him more guaranteed money to seal the deal.