When the veteran NFL players and owners sat down to figure out how to best break up the $9 billion pie (which is all the lockout was about, regardless of what kind of White Hat/Black Hat/Heroes/Villains story the media tells), it was easy to see what group of essentially unrepresented stakeholders would lose: rookies. Both veterans and owners thought the rookies were making too much, and the representatives for the rookies said — wait, nevermind, there were no representatives for the rookies. So of course the result is things like this:
Carolina instead gave [kicker Olindo] Mare a four-year, $12 million dollar offer. That happened not because Mare went back on his word, but in the intervening months, the NFL veterans decided to rob Cam Newton to pay Olindo Mare. The most important (and player-friendly) aspect of the new CBA was the salary floor, requiring teams like Carolina to spend tens of millions of dollars. Only not on rookies.
. . . [B]etween Mare, Williams, Anderson and Johnson, Carolina has opened the door to spend $155 million dollars on three players who were on the team last year and a kicker. But hope and optimism for the Panthers in 2011 and beyond mainly rests on the drafting of Auburn star Cam Newton. And what will Carolina pay the young quarterback? Roughly 22 million dollars over four seasons, with a team-option for a fifth year.
That’s right: over the next four years, Carolina will pay their 38-year-old placekicker 12 million dollars and their franchise savior 22 million dollars. Newton’s contract looks even worse when you consider that Carolina can hold him for a fifth season, making it difficult for players to renegotiate until after they’ve completed three seasons.
Right. And, as Chase explains, this is not just limited to Carolina, but instead was out of design:
And, of course, this is not simply a Cam Newton diatribe. The Bengals signed fourth overall pick A.J. Green to a four-year deal worth $19.6 million, with a team option to extend the deal to a fifth year. Sidney Rice just signed a deal for $41 million over five years, Santonio Holmes went for $50 million over the same span, and Santana Moss just got $15 million over three years from the Redskins. Only one of those contracts looks like a steal. Even the Bengals wouldn’t be silly enough to trade Green for Moss, yet Moss’s contract is actually more player-friendly than Green’s! Try getting someone in your dynasty league to trade A.J. Green for Santana Moss, and see how that goes. Green isn’t as proven as Holmes, but his contract is significantly less attractive. On the open market, I suspect he’d sign for a bit more than the megadeal Rice just landed.
. . . Within five minutes of publishing this article, Kevin Kolb’s new contract with the Arizona Cardinals was announced. Five years, $63.5 million. Kolb will be getting double Cam Newton money. Because he’s a proven veteran, after all.