Atlanta sets the price for FA linebackers

[Fatwhite02]

Atlanta signed Keith Brooking to a seven year $41 million dollar deal including a 10.5 million dollar signing bonus. With this done it will set the mark for what many other FA LB negotiate with. I think Spikes will be wanting a similar deal.

[kgun12]

Thanks FatW2.

Clump or Eb Break down the contract for us

PLEASE-n-THANK YOU

[The_Philster]

Ouch...just shy of $6M a year??

[don137]

Good news is I can't see Cincy spending 20 million in signing bonuses for the first overall pick and matching a contract like Brooking received for Spikes. Bad news that is a lot of money for a linebacker and I can see Cincy matching this type of offer and trading down in the draft because there are less guarantees from a player coming out of college.

[TigerJ]

That's an unusually long contract. I wonder if it's heavily backloaded. Doing the math, $30.5 million of it is salary. That's an average of a little over $4.35 million per year. It could start out at under three million per year. Atlanta might be able to cut him or renegotiate after five years with only a modest dead cap hit. Perhaps that means the bar isn't raised as high as we might fear.

[Tatonka]

i believe it is backloaded tiger.. his cap his is not that great this year, i believe i heard him say that in a quote.. he said something along the lines of, with the way it was structured, then can still go out and particate in FA to make a superbowl run...

i do remember one sticking point or hold being that the signing bonus wasnt big enough for such a backloaded deal too..

not sure about the opt out clauses though.