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Notes -
Part 2
With no other teams making offers, and Jackson’s relationship with the Ravens deteriorating, it’s expected that he will refuse to sign the tender offer and sit out the season. This expectation was bolstered today by Jackson posting that he had requested a trade at the beginning of this month, and subsequently had the tag slapped on him. While the 2020 CBA technically ended contract holdouts, Jackson’s situation is different because he’s not currently under contract. He’s subject to the tag rules, but the league has no basis for fining him for missing team activities.
This refusal to sign has only happened once before, and with disastrous results. In 2018, Le’veon Bell was one of the best running backs in the league. He had already played one season on the franchise tag, and, unable to come to terms on a deal, the Steelers tagged him again (it can be done two years in a row but it’s significantly more expensive). The Steelers purportedly offered him a deal that would have made him the highest-paid RB in the league, but this wasn’t enough; he was also a key component of the passing game, and thought that he deserved RB money and WR money.
Bell entered 2018 as a training camp holdout, not unexpected since this was still common. What was uncommon was that he didn’t show up for the first game either. Or the second game. It was speculated that he might come back during the bye week. He didn’t. He came back to Pittsburgh in early November, as he had until the 13th to sign his tender offer before forfeiting the season. But he never reported to the team. When the Steelers said in early 2019 that they wouldn’t tag him again, Bell had technically won.
But then came reality. Bell had lost out on roughly $14.5 million in salary from not signing the tag, and an estimated $19 million from not taking the Steelers up on their offer. When he hit the market in the Spring of 2019, he signed with the Jets, who offered him a deal worth an average of $13.1 million a year, less than the $14 million on average the Steelers had offered. And the first year of that deal paid roughly what he would have made on the franchise tag the previous year. And only some of that money was guaranteed. Little more than a year into his time with the Jets he demanded a trade, realizing he didn’t like playing for an awful team. His own production had suffered in the absence of a decent O-line. The Jets simply released him, and he signed with the Chiefs, a good team, but found himself at the bottom of the depth chart, and later made critical statements about Andy Reid.
In the span of 4 years Bell went from being the kind of player who could credibly demand becoming the highest-paid player at his position to having completely burned his bridges with 3 different teams and being out of the league entirely. The holdout was an unmitigated disaster. Like Jackson, Bell was injury-prone, which may have had something to do with the Steelers’ reluctance to give him what he wanted, but it’s hard to see them making him a better offer in any event. The one crucial difference is that Bell was hit with the exclusive tag, meaning he couldn’t negotiate for other teams and can thus be forgiven for thinking his market value was higher. There’s no excuse for Jackson; if teams are unwilling to negotiate with him now, it’s unlikely that they will after he sits out a year. And Jackson has a recent example of how that works out that Bell didn’t. Complicating matters is the fact that Jackson is acting as his own agent. Any agent worth his salt would have told him that the strategy he’s been pursuing thus far is a bad one and probably would have signed him last offseason. Any agent also would have told him that his request for a trade was inappropriate since he wasn’t under contract at the time and thus couldn’t be traded until he signs the tender offer.
The interesting thing to me about this, though, is the reaction. Most situations involving pro athletes elicit one of the following responses:
Fans and media mad at players for acting unreasonably, e.g. Antonio Brown
ans and media mad at team for not treating player fairly, e.g. study clauses, voided guarantees, etc.
ans and media mad at league for collusion, e.g. Colin Kaepernick, every threatened lockout
Instead, there’s a sense of sad resignation. Lamar Jackson was supposed to win Super Bowls. Instead Ravens fans got one playoff win and 2 unfinished seasons due to injury. But still, Jackson is nonetheless one of the most talented and exciting WBs in the league, and is very much deserving of a nice contract. But nice wasn’t good enough, and he seems intent on throwing his career down the toilet to prove it. And he doesn’t even have the courtesy to become unlikeable. Prior to his holdout, Bell had been publicly dissing the team for years for supposed lack of respect, and during his holdout he claimed to be staying in shape but was evidently spending a lot of time at strip clubs. When he came back to Pittsburgh, his first public sighting wasn’t at the team facility but playing pickup basketball at a local LA Fitness. That may not seem like a big deal (he is exercising), but coaches hate it when players do stuff like this because they have a tendency to injure themselves.
Jackson remains appreciative of the fans, if not the team, but seems to be taking advice from friends and family rather than an agent, which is inexcusable because NFL agent fees are capped at 3%, and a high-earner like Jackson can probably get 1%. The Ravens seem determined to do everything they can to prove to Jackson that he won’t get a better deal elsewhere, although the terms of the non-exclusive cap may limit that since the teams most likely to sign Jackson are rebuilding teams that can’t afford to give up draft picks and are reluctant to put out offer sheets that the Ravens will probably match. The most logical thing would be for the 49ers to offer Trey Lance and draft picks in exchange for Jackson, but that would require Jackson signing a tender offer first, and wouldn’t give him a new deal, just a chance to play for a different team and maybe negotiate a long-term deal. It’s complicated, and who knows how it will play out.
This is interesting (but probably rather more so to those with at least a passing knowledge of football), but I admit that I'm not entirely clear what the culture war angle is. Just that the fans are NOT really taking sides, when they might ordinarily?
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This reminds me of something I read a few years ago about how the Philadelphia 76ers were using contracts to essentially sell their players extremely expensive insurance.
IIRC, players in the NBA get an automatic 4 year rookie contract whose terms are dictated by their order in the draft. When the contract is up they become a free agent. At that time, if the player has become an established starter, he will earn a massive payday. But if not, he will get at best a marginal contract or maybe even get bounced from the league.
The 76ers leveraged this uncertainty by offering guaranteed extensions far before the expiration of the rookie contract. The offer would be much less than the expected value of the contract, in effect charging the player a huge premium to remove the uncertainty of becoming injured or playing poorly. While theoretically a win/win, the rules of the league prohibited other teams from making similar offers, so the 76ers had a defacto monopoly on this type of insurance. And naturally the 76ers could, in theory, tank a player's value by refusing to give him playtime or a role in the offense. So, for a player, it would take a lot of guts to bet on yourself instead of taking a much lower guaranteed payday.
Indeed, and it more or less worked with the Embiid contract and more or less backfired with the Simmons contract.
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Baseball teams have started doing this as well. Sure guys go from career earnings of say 400m to 150m but after the first 50m does it really matter?
With how tax brackets work, I wouldn't be surprised if the "low" earners in these sports might actually have more expected value from a longer insured contract than a shorter uninsured one. $1m/year for four years is easily better than $4m for 1 year if you think that is the only contract you'll ever get.
I almost wonder if teams and players would be better off negotiating pension style deals rather than big single year payouts. I guess the rules on how many "players" you are allowed to pay probably prevent something like that. But I don't know why teams can't offer something like "team ambassador" or nonsense coaching positions for retired players.
A lot relates to the CBA’s signed. With that said, famously Bobby Bonilla I think is still paid by the Mets. Likewise, Ken Griffey Junior is I believe the third or fourth highest paid player on the Reds and he hasn’t played in about what seven years?
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Bell may have been washed the year before. He turned down 14 after a year he averaged 4.0 ypc. The decline may have already occurred which is why you don’t give long term money to running backs.
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Good write up but I feel like you kind of glossed over that he’s not really proven as a pocket-passer at all. People point to the injury concerns for a running QB, and Lamar has a bit of an injury history now, but I think the main problem is simply that we’ve only seen him succeed in a sort-of gimmicky offense tailored to his running ability. He had one incredible season, plus a couple more good ones, and he is certainly a good QB. But the reality is that he has thrown for over 3000 yards only once in 5 years and has played terribly in the playoffs. There’ve been plenty of examples of guys who are great runners, and just okay passers having great seasons and then flaming out, and we haven’t seen any QBs who aren’t primarily passers win any Super Bowls.
Regarding the public reaction, I think you’re also ignoring that tons of people have been claiming it’s the owners colluding to not give out guaranteed contracts. I agree though that the reaction at least on Reddit is a little more sane than I would expect. I think that can be explained by the fact that 1) the ravens offered him a mega-deal that just wasn’t quite big enough for him, 2) many fans are skeptical of giving him a long-term deal due to either injury concerns or (like me) thinking he’s unproven as a passer, 3) the player who received the gigantic ill-advised contract he is asking for is black so it makes it hard to argue the racial angle, and 4) the media has had this weird paternalistic relationship towards him since before he was drafted a few teams wanted him to work out as a running back which many media people considered to be racist. So when they see him making a stupid decision like acting as his own agent and essentially asking his team to cripple their future, they can’t condemn him for being stupid and go with the “oh what a pity” reaction instead
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Great write-up.
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Ahhhh.....The Days Of Our Steelers
Did not expect to find another U-Tree fan here.
There are dozens of us! DOZENS! (Though of the five Clickbait guys I'm inexorably becoming more and more of a Tom Grossi stan)
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I'd already seen the video, and while I wouldn't exactly consider myself a fan (he's not particularly knowledgeable about the sports he covers), his football videos can be entertaining. His hockey videos... meh. His discussions about hockey futility ignore the fact that good teams don't always win championships and he tries to place the blame on the teams themselves, but doesn't offer any analysis beyond "they couldn't get the job done".
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I will point out that on /r/nfl there have been a surprising (and, to me, refreshing) number of comments about how Lamar Jackson is basically a complete moron, that everyone has known for a while that he’s very low-IQ (by QB standards, at least) - there was a lot of mockery of the atrocious grammar in his tweet, and one user even referenced the fact that based on his Wunderlic score and interviews with teams before he was drafted, many teams were scared off by the fact that he is functionally illiterate - and that this has been a needless shredding of the goodwill many fans had toward him.
Of course, I do not expect any but a handful of NFL fans to start connecting any forbidden dots about what that might suggest about larger racial patterns in the league, but I was heartened by the exasperated response of most fans when there was some scuttlebutt about Lamar Jackson feeling racially-marginalized because Daniel Jones (a dead-average and whiter-than-white young quarterback for the New York Giants) got a contract and Jackson didn’t. The fans overwhelmingly shouted this down and pointed out the absurdity of the claim and the vast differences between the two players’ expectations and situations.
He has no constituency. Usually, fans of the QB's team would go through threads downvoting critical opinions and making things unpleasant for anyone commenting on the emperor's clothes. But Ravens fans have emotionally detached from Lamar at this point.
/r/nfl threads don't reflect average opinion, but who can turn out the most passionate mob of slactivists at a given time. If Lamar had an energized base of fans, they'd probably be out in force playing the race card.
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What a fantastic recap of the Lamar Jackson saga - thanks!
A couple quickies I'd like to add also:
He scored a 13 on the Wonderlic test (the test given all incoming QBs to the NFL from college) which is abhorrent and although he's clearly literate, it's hard to tell how literate. So he doesn't have an agent imo because he's a dumb guy. An agent that he would listen to would have set him straight last season - he's already lost millions by not signing last season and, like Bell and others, may never be close to recouping. But he is a QB - and he is great - and by all accounts he seems like a nice dude ... So you never know, which is what he's banking on. I just felt important to add the context of how not bright this guy actually is and why, imo, he doesn't have an agent.
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