Quick Thoughts On The Babin Deal

While we wait for the final cuts to come through, thought I'd speculate on the Babin deal a little.

The interesting thing is how they did it. Rather than renegotiate, they actually terminated the old deal. That means that they cut Babin and immediately resigned him to a new one-year contract. Because he is a veteran heading into his sixth season, he didn't have to pass through waivers before the Eagles could resign him.

What this does is preserve the Eagles' ability to renegotiate the deal again this year. Deals can't be renegotiated more than one time in a season. Note that you can renegotiate once, so you can sign a player and then regegotiate a day later, but you are then barred from doing so again for 12 months.

Further, Babin was signed to a minimum deal. This is treated specially under the CBA, and the Eagles would have had a cap hit for Babin that was lower than his actual salary. However, there are strings attached there. My memory (which could be faulty) is that players who qualify for this treatment can't be extended into future years; you'd have to wait until they are free agents again and then re-sign them.

The Eagles could very well have made the new deal identical from a cash perspective, but used a LTBE (and it wouldn't have to be a very big one) to disqualify this deal from that treatment and make an extension easier during the year if Jason Babin turns into the next Kyle van den Bosch. As I said earlier, this is speculation on my part, but I wanted to put it out there.

Now, I'd also point out that there is speculation that Babin's LTBE replaces Klecko's. I don't really understand why they'd do that, though. The purpose of Klecko's LTBE wasn't for 2009, it was for 2008. Because contracts can't fall by more than 50% from year to year, he had to have a big LTBE in 2009 to allow the huge one he had in 2008. Because of the current rules, LTBEs in 2009 are useless to the team unless the CBA is extended prior to the last game of the regular season. That has no chance of happening, at a minimum because the player representitives to the NFPA just won't have time to really review and approve a new deal during the regular season. So it seems unlikely that preserving that LTBE is the motivation.