Howie Roseman is, once again, receiving a lot of praise in the offseason. This time, for his business acumen.
Former NFL agent and Green Bay Packers vice president (1998-2008) and current sports law professor at Villanova, Andrew Brandt, raved about his friend Howie Roseman one day after the Eagles made history signing Jalen Hurts to a five-year, $255 million contract extension.
"I'm a little biased, I've known Howie for—I don't know, 25, 30 years," Brandt told the 94WIP Morning Show on Tuesday. "We grew up in the business together. I now live down the street from him. I had him at Villanova last week talking to the group. He brings a competitive advantage. And this is what people don't understand about being a general manager, we're not living in the 1990's or the 2000's anymore. This is huge business as you discussed and the idea of general managers being only scouts is really passe, even though some teams still have that.
"Howie has taken advantage of the scouts slash GM over and over again because he comes from the background that, frankly, I came from which is: negotiating, legal, financial, business. Now, he's turned himself into a good scout, but when you come from that background, you come in with an advantage—not only in player contracts, but in trades and moves around the board and negotiating when you are always a step ahead...It's still confounding to me how these assets worth five, six, seven billion dollars are hiring scouts to run their operation."
Jon Ritchie asked Brandt how Roseman was able to do the deal with such seemingly favorable small cap hits on the contract.
"If there's only 50 million of cap over the first three years, there's 200 million of cap coming. I don't trust all of the numbers out there, I've got to see it all...Forget about cap," Brandt warned. "Cap is what people like me and Howie do to manage the roster. It's just accounting and pushing out money. The real issue from a team perspective, from insiders look at is, what's the cash? How much is the player walking away [with] after year one, after year two, after three, after year five...And it looks to me this is two years, $64 million. As you mentioned, [Daniel] Jones is two years, $82 million. It looks like this is maybe three years, $110 million because that's the guarantee. Three years, $110 [million] that's a steal...Now we'll wait and see. But Howie doesn't, to me, impress upon everything with cap. Cap can be moved around. We've seen teams move cap all of the time. The issue is what is he paying these guys versus what other teams pay these guys. You've got Haason Reddick on like a 15 million dollar a year deal when players of his ilk are getting 27, 28 million a year. Like, I don't know how he does it. At some point you're going to have agents and teams like, run."
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