Brandt On The Maclin Negotiations

- Posted by Sam -

Andrew Brandt put up an explanation of sorts for why the Maclin negotiations took so long. He is clearly more careful in what he says than other members of the Eagles' front office -- which probably helps him be a good negotiator. He goes out of his way to avoid directly saying anything bad about Maclin's agent -- though he does make a comment below that could be taken to be a shot.

He doesn't say exactly what took so long, but he does suggest that it had to do with the various clauses that were involved:

With the Maclin deal, there were a lot of moving parts on the money and the structure issues of the contract, with deals around us that were not consistent in all areas, making the “fitting in” aspect of the negotiation not as easy as it sounds. Once we were able to figure out premiums, discounts, approximate values of different escalators, structures, payouts, etc., we moved forward with a deal -- with some twists and turns thrown in along the way (for a while, I wondered if I were negotiating a football contract or the Mideast Peace Treaty).

My guess is that there must be some sort of term that the agency that represented Maclin (and a bunch of other first round picks) was trying to add to first round contracts, or simplification of achieving later year escalators, and that the Eagles resisted. What we don't know is who caved (or if a compromise was reached) on the term(s) in question.

Hopefully some intrepid MSM source (or someone like JI Halsell) will be able to untangle all of that ... or that Brandt will keep his word and address this again at a later date.