Eagles have over $22 million in dead cap after Sam Bradford trade

The Eagles are building for the future, and few would argue that the team has not improved vastly thanks to Howie Roseman’s recent trades of DeMarco Murray, Byron Maxwell, Sam Bradford and Mark Sanchez (among others — including Eric Rowe and Kiko Alonso).

But a byproduct of all that movement of players with undesirable contracts is the Eagles were left to eat a lot of dead money. According to Spotrac.com, Philly has the third most dead money of any NFL team at just over $22.4 million. Only the Browns and Saints have more.That’s roughly 14 percent of the team’s $155 million salary cap allowance.

Philadelphia is playing 13 players more than $100,000 this season to not play for the team, including Matt Barkley ($124,000), Riley Cooper ($2.4 million), Evan Mathis ($1 million) and Rueben Randle ($500,000).

The Birds are eating more than half a million of Rowe’s salary, the second-year corner they traded to the Patriots Tuesday, and are taking a $5.5 million cap hit on Bradford’s salary after sending him to the Vikings Saturday. The Eagles already paid Bradford $11 million when he signed his contract.

In 2017, things clear up with most of these salary hits coming off the books, save for a $904,000 sap hit the Eagles will hang on to for Rowe. The cavalier approach the team is taking by building up dead money will not hurt it long term, so it isn’t as bad as it looks.