Bleeding Green Nation
It remains to be seen if Philadelphia’s top tight end will be re-signed after 2025.
The Philadelphia Eagles had one of the busiest offseasons in the NFL, rewarding Saquon Barkley, Zack Baun, and other key contributors while moving on from starters like Darius Slay and James Bradberry. Philadelphia’s roster is in a strong position as the team prepares to defend their Super Bowl title, with plenty of financial flexibility for the 2025 season and $31.1 million in top-51 salary cap space.
Much of that flexibility is due to Howie Roseman’s propensity for extremely aggressive contract structures and heavily backloaded deals. That’s a strategy that has worked quite well for the Eagles – they just won a Super Bowl! — but carries a fair amount of long-term financial risk. Put simply, the strategy works as long as the players you choose to pay continue to play well and stay healthy, and you continue to draft well to stock the roster with young, affordable talent.
Philadelphia has nailed this so far, which is why the team is the favorite to repeat as Super Bowl champions in 2025 with plenty of cap space to spare this season and the third-most dead cap in the NFL.
2025 is in good shape, but what about 2026? The Eagles are already third in projected dead cap heading into next season and have just $21 million in projected cap space despite having only 49 players under contract. Notably, players like Reed Blankenship, Nakobe Dean, Dallas Goedert, Josh Uche, and Azeez Ojulari are all slated to hit free agency.
Speaking of Goedert, he’ll be responsible for a whopping $20.5 million in additional dead cap once his contract voids at the start of the 2026 season. This is due to the aforementioned aggressive backloading on his contract, as the bill finally comes due if he isn’t re-signed prior to the start of the 2026 league year. The good news is the Eagles can avoid this dead money charge by “keeping it rolling” with another extension for Goedert, if they so choose. The bad news is there’s a hard deadline to avoid the dead money charge, which gives Goedert significant leverage and little financial incentive to take a small deal from Philadelphia.
Goedert already agreed to a pay cut in May 2025, reducing his base salary by $4.25 million in exchange for full guarantees on his remaining money. So clearly he’s at least willing to work with the Eagles and has a desire to stick around. The bigger question is if Goedert is in the Eagles’ future plans, and if they’re willing to pay him enough to keep him around. Goedert has struggled with injuries throughout his NFL career but especially last season, playing in just 10 games in 2024 and turning in the second-worst receiving performance of his career.
The Eagles have two options with Goedert in 2026. They can either let his contract void and eat the $20.5 million dead cap charge all at once, which would be...
