Its not backloading a contract, its income deferral. Its cash payout vs accrued earnings. There's a difference.
It's all plugged into the salary cap, which are the rules the team has to play by. The players and agents (mostly) aren't idiots. They all know the time value of money and charge for those deferrals.
Yes, I should have just googled market mechanics to understand them. What was I thinking studying it in undergrad, then again in grad school, and then working 15+ years applying it in the real world? I should have just googled it instead. How stupid of me :facepalm
Well then, you are owed a crap ton of cash back on that investment
Let's try this again using YOUR example, shall we.
If I sell you a new Bentley Continental for $100, that doesn't mean that Bently's have a market value of $100. That just means one guy is an idiot, and the other guy got a great deal.
If the guy selling the Bentley only talked to one person, then yes, he was an idiot. If the guy selling the Bentley talked to the entire market (the 31 one other people in the entire world who could buy this special model Bentley) and no one offered more than $100 dollars, then that IS THE MARKET price. :facepalm It doesn't matter if the price would be different next week if he has to sell the car this week. We played a game of craps trying to extract a higher price than the expected comp pick. We might have lost -- it's hard to really know because the comp rules are so complicated and depends on so many variables.
The part of this you simply refuse to accept is the team didn't value Landry the same way you and half the boards here did. You can argue the team is being stupid, but that would be pretty interesting for a guy with such academic impressive credentials to form an opinion without all of the inside info (a.k.a. data) the team has and you don't.
Personally, I don't get it. I don't get the love for a very good, but not great player who was demanding contract terms that only 1 or 2 teams were willing to consider. Every team in the league has 4 years of film and many have played against him. If he's so damned valuable, why didn't anyone other than the browns bite? When young, great players hit the market, there is a feeding frenzy. He's young, healthy, and has impressive stats. Where is the love from anyone other than people here on the boards? Could it be that every team took a hard look and asked: does he change games, does he require defensive scheming, does he require double coverage and answered every question with 'no'. The market spoke: he's good, but not a game changer and that's not worth north of $15M a year, deferred or not.