How to play this off-season with free agency?

[Chargem]

Originally Posted by DRM08

Yep. Mahomes will be in his prime 5-6 years down the road. Higher salary makes sense at that point. Will Jones still be in his prime 4-5 years from now? Setting that aside, Jones has made $6.2M and Mahomes has made $13.7M. Would think the lower paid guy needs more frontloading on the new contract.

There isn't any room to front load either contract right now. Front and back loading is also purely related to the cap, and nothing to do with when the guy gets the cash a lot of the time.

[chiefzilla1501]

Originally Posted by Chargem

There isn't any room to front load either contract right now. Front and back loading is also purely related to the cap, and nothing to do with when the guy gets the cash a lot of the time.

It depends on what you mean by frontloading. You can basically frontload mahomes contract in practice, back load it in theory.

Mahomes will get a huge signing bonus. You can basically give him gigantic base salaries later in the contract which will restructure into signing bonuses. It's a good way to get mahomes huge chunks of cash at different points in the contract without taking much of a base salary hit. A luxury you have for a qb you want to be here for 10 years, unlike a rb who you just don't know longevity.

If you structure the contract that way, you can give him big base salaries in year 2 and 3 and we could absolutely afford it. I like that approach because it allows mahomes to collect a ton of cash so that by year 3 or 4, he might be a lot more willing to take paycuts for the good of the team.