Reports are that Bakh will get 48 million in the next 3 months. Yes, that's a lot of money up front but same reports are that this will actually turn out to be a fairly cap friendly structured deal that could allow them to sign Aaron Jones, eventually Alexander and perhaps Lindsey.
I just keep going back to what Bakh said in an interview about 2 months ago. And that was the bottom line is:
If a team wants to sign and keep a core player they don't want leaving, they can and will figure it out. And the team he said was a prime example is the Chiefs. The Chiefs basically had 150K in cap room and through restructuring deals and moving around cap dollars, signed Mahomes, T Kelce, and Chris Jones to mega deals. And they aren't alone. Teams like the Whiners and Cryboys do this shit all the time.
Yes, the Patriots are in cap hell now but that's also for very short sighted contracts like Antonio Brown and years and years of bad contract signing. We are talking about signing a premiere LT, the 2nd most important position behind QB.
I think fans have to stop looking at how the cap works and think it's 2005. It's not. These dollars and structuring gets finagled all the damn time. Team after team does this and us fans always sit here dumbfounded thinking "how can they do this?! How can this deal be done ?!"
IMO, it's one of the main reasons that did Ted Thompson in. He could never get past operating like it was 2005. So many guys we could have signed in FA and been fine. He didn't and the talent of the team suffered for it.