Just practicing my "laying on a bed of green" move
So, you may have heard, yesterday was the first day of NFL free agency, where teams trip over themselves to give out huge, backloaded contracts to players who won't live up to those contracts and will be cut in three years, only to get another similar contract from some other idiot team. In my 'hood, we call it "Portering". Actually, we don't. But we should.
Every year around this time, fans get pissed at their team's players when they leave to go elsewhere for more money. "No one's going to know your name in 5 years!". "Welcome to mediocrity!". "Greedy! Don't let the door hit you on the way out!". And all that shizz. And it's fuckin' retarded. "You must not care about winning!". Yeah, I guess Peyton Manning doesn't then, either.
Let's break this down. I am firmly in the chase the money camp. For one, you really only get one shot at the huge, guaranteed-money contract. Yeah, you can get a 5-year $35 million Eric Wright deal, but then you get cut after a year and see maybe $5 mil of it. The devil is in the details, and the details are the guaranteed money. That's all you are sure to get. People yell at players to honor their contract, but, basically - the next team that honors the full length of a free agent contract will be the first. Ask James Harrison or James Farrior or Joey Porter or your teams favorite players or Javon Walker or Adalius Thomas or Anquan Boldin or anybody. They almost never see the end of those big money deals. Ever. You think Peyton Manning's going to get all five $20 mil years out of Denver? I don't. Remember this because I'm going to use him in a second.
For the Steelers right now, that player is Mike Wallace. A guy who was given pure hell last year because he wasn't giving $8 mil worth of production on his $2.5 mil restricted free agent tender, which is just so free market. (Remember that too, because I'll use it later). He jumped at the money that Miami was throwing at him, and people are crushing him for it. The same people who say the Steelers are on a bullet train to a 6-10 season because the coach is incompetent and the line sucks. And the QB's a borderline retard. So Mike Wallace likely took money over a "ring". So what? Who the fuck cares? Let's just get into all of these arguments, bullet-point style:
• "You chased money over rings!" - Who gives a shit? This is a job. One thing I learned, a very hard truth about these guys, is that fans generally care a LOT more than the players do over losses. I learned this while valeting at a club that the players went to after games. I'm not saying they were all "HA! We lost! It was awesome!"...I mean, they were generally a bit more somber than they would be otherwise, but it wasn't a huge deal. It was a bad day at the office. Do you think Lamarr Woodley cried after they lost to Cincinnati last year? I don't. Did your Uncle Donny? I bet he was fucking losing it in his Black and Gold room. Probably weeping like a dude on Maury that just found out that he was the father, or maybe like a kid who's parents just got divorced and then killed each other in a gruesome murder-suicide. Basically, take the money and be set for life. Because the team's going to cut you in three years anyway. Would you rather have $30 MM and no rings, or $12 MM and be able to say "I won a Super Bowl championship!". For me it's easily the former. The only benefit in the latter is that when you run out of money, you can sell the Super Bowl ring for cash.
• "You only care about money, not winning" - Two things. First, the NFL is so hard to predict that you never really know who's going to have a shot, even a year ahead of time. Anybody see the 8-8 Steelers and 5-11 Lions losing out to the 11-5 Colts? This isn't like choosing the Royals over the Nationals. Secondly, show me a player that only cares about winning. And I don't mean by "taking less money". Peyton Manning, a guy wildly successful in both his long career and his off-the-field endorsement life, took $20 mil from the Broncos. TWENTY FUCKING MIL! So he chose a good team. You think that means he's purely committed to winning? If he were...and I mean, if he were 100% ONLY TRULY MADLY DEEPLY COMMITTED to winning, why not take...say, $1 mil? And let the team spend that $19 around him, building a better team overall and allowing Elvis Dumervil to buy one of his Buicks? Instead, Dumervil's about to be cut and the $20 million dollar man is going to throw away another postseason berth. This is why San Francisco and Seattle can be so successful - they have QBs on their rookie deals, and second round rookie deals at that. It's a huge advantage over teams like New Orleans and Baltimore, who have QBs who are supposedly committed to winning yet who take up a full fifth of the entire motherfucking salary cap. Quash that nonsense.
• "You're greedy! Do you really need all that money?" - Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Everybody in this world chases the money. And this is not a political rant, but I hear this from a ton of conservatives. If you're a flowers and rainbows liberal then...fine, make this point in between flute-led interpretive dance sessions. But how in the world can people rectify "you are making enough money, leave some for your team to sign a left guard you greedy son-of-a-bitch!" with "man, an extra 3% on billionaires is not fair! They worked for that!". Well, so did Dwight Freeney, so let him get his damn money.
• "It's your job! If I made a million at my job..." - Ok. There's a reason you don't make a million at your job. Actually, there are a few. Let's get into it:
- The NFL is a $9 BILLION a year industry. Supply and demand. There is a market for paying players millions upon millions to win football games. Basically, with all of this information, you could probably calculate the value of a win. Baseball has (sabermetric calculations say about $5 mil or so per win, but I'm not sure of quite what that entails - seems ridic high). Your job probably doesn't, and if it does, it's likely not on the strength of you and 51 of your employees.
- No one is paying to watch you work, no one is buying your Office Depot replica frock or your Jeff's Marina Sales Division replica polo, and it's probably much easier to replace you than it is to replace Calvin Johnson. Calvin Johnson is probably the single greatest wide receiver on planet Earth. If I were, say, a lawyer, and I were the single greatest lawyer on the entire planet Earth and demonstrably so, I could probably get away with whatever the fuck I wanted to. Oh, and they'd pay me millions on top of millions. But at the moment, I'm writing a blog about NFL contracts on a free hosting service. I'm easier to replace than Anquan Boldin, and even he almost got cut.
And finally, professional sports ain't really a free market. In the NFL, if you haven't been cut, you can't become a free agent without 4 years of service time. You get drafted to a job and you get a contract due to your slotting. Plain and simple. You don't really get a choice to "honor your contract". You take the contract that a bunch of dudes you don't know bargained in a room years ago to keep the government off their backs about anti-trust behavior. If you don't like it, too bad. Then after three years you get a restricted free agent tag. The team tells you what you are getting, you either take it or retire, and provisions generally restrict other teams from offering you a deal you could get on the open market. Now compare that to the real world, where you choose your job, and you can just quit at any time and go work somewhere else down the street. Imagine Mario Williams quitting the Bills and going to work for the Jets. Crazy, right? It ain't the real world. So stop comparing it to the real world.
The point is, you get one shot in your professional sporting life to make all the money you can make to not only set you up for life if you are responsible with it (yeah, yeah, that's another story altogether), but enough to set your family up for generations. It makes all the sense in the world to chase they money while you can. You can tear an ACL tomorrow pretty routinely in these jobs (RG III if he doesn't completely heal up is going to make far less than he would as a healthy RGIII). You can blow out an achilles (Fred Davis did a few weeks before becoming a free agent, cost him millions). It's a job, people. It's 2013. Get used to it.
