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Think what you want from The Veon Bell's decision to spend the season looking for wealth in free agents, but the key word is "think about it".
Now it's tempting to get out of your corner and settle into an immediate conclusion backed by a long-established, well-established NFL thought: Bell is crazy. He played his hand too much. He'll never have what he's looking for. He left his team. The Steelers are doing well without him. It's silly to pay the halves.
The facts are that this case is not over yet, that we can not see the future and that no definitive conclusion can be drawn as to Bell's maneuver before March, when we discover the type of free agent contract that he ends up getting. If he wins a mega deal at the Todd Gurley, it was worth it. But if he has to accept a one-year contract, because there are not enough interested teams, it's a big mistake. We do not know and we can not yet know the result.
The All-Pro RB was not bluffing because it will not pass the 2018 season. What will the Steelers do next? Who will want to sign after the off season?
Nobody wanted that to come, but both sides can still get what they want and be better off. Here is how it can work.
Two franchise tags, $ 855,000 lost per week and a lost season. The stalemate is finally over, but getting to this point is a complicated story.
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What we do know is that Bell's situation offers us a chance, if not an obligation, to think differently about the NFL and its economic structure. One of the best players in the world has just finished his 26-year season because he thought it was a smart, long-term financial strategy. An employee used up his own leverage to try to gain ground in a system designed almost entirely for the benefit of the employer. If that does not make us wonder what we thought we knew about how it works, it's a missed opportunity on our part.
Let's start with the franchise label itself – a widely recognized fact of the NFL's economy but also an anticapitalist device designed to limit the power of buying the best players. The Steelers did not want to give Bell the deal they wanted and they did not want to lose it either. Fortunately, they operate one of the 32 companies in the world that can have this cake and eat it too. For three consecutive years, a team may, if it has the means, prevent a player from entering the open market by simply designating him as a franchise player and assigning him a one-year contract for a salary. negotiated collectively.
It's a crazy idea to which players should never have agreed in the early 90's at the time of his proposal. But like many other things about the NFL, it is rooted and fans accept it, especially when it prevents your team from losing its best players. Even the players do not really fight it in collective bargaining because the vast majority of them will never have to deal with it (a perspective that misconstrues the principle that higher wages on the market are advantageous for all salaries).
What Bell has done here is to reject the notion that there is nothing you can do with the franchise etiquette. The Steelers used it as a pressure tactic in contract negotiations and used it, two years in a row, to make sure no other team could offer him a long-term contract. . The premise is that Bell had two choices: sign a long term contract under the terms of the Steelers or play on the franchise label for one year. The offer offered by the Steelers was not the one he was looking for, and the franchise etiquette meant that they did not have to improve it for make him stay.
It turned out that Bell had a third choice, which was to use his own leverage and retain his services. Even when Bell telegraphed this in January, hardly anyone thought it because … well, who does that? Of course, Sean Gilbert and Dan Williams did it in the late '90s, but none of those guys had received $ 14.5 million on their franchise labels, unlike what Bell would have done in 2018 The size of this number and the assumption Playing football this year was one of Bell's top priorities, which made the threat easy to dismiss until it officially surrendered to the situation. Tuesday afternoon.
Which brings us to our next point: the obvious fact that playing football and earning $ 14.5 million was NOT one of Bell's top priorities for 2018. Bell's priority has always been the big deal of an independent agent whom he believes to expect reached the free market in March. He looked at what Gurley got from the Rams: $ 14.4 million a year for four years, including $ 21.95 million at the signing and $ 12.55 million in guarantees that will begin in March. No offer from the Steelers, whose stubborn traditional contract structure guarantees only the signing bonus, is similar to that. And having watched Kirk Cousins has already tried the same fate last spring. Bell rightly thinks that a free-market free market agency could convince him even more than Gurley has gotten.
But the football game this year can be the most seismic aspect of it all. Bell's decision was that, if he wanted to be in the best possible conditions for free will next spring, playing football this year was one of the worst things he could do. This is the part that should grab the attention of everyone – teams, fans and especially guys like Alvin Kamara and Kareem Hunt, two other half-dozers who will face a similar decision and who will soon face similar decisions. Bell looks at the 2018 season and thinks the Steelers will use it as they've always done it – about 400 passes in the regular season and maybe push it even harder in what they hope to be a race in the playoffs. This type of exposure to injury and wear and tear did not appeal to a guy whose priority was to be as healthy as possible when he was talking to the teams about finding a job. historic agreement next spring. He therefore decided not to engage in it. .
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Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin talks about the business aspect that is part of the NFL.
What Conner did made the Steelers easier for everyone. Their purpose perfectly matches the conventional wisdom of the NFL. If you want to perceive players – and especially halves – as replaceable widgets, the 2018 Steelers are your piece A. If Tuesday was the finish line of the saga The Vein Bell, then the Steelers were the big winners.
But Tuesday was not the finish line, because all this is bigger than Bell against the Steelers. This is the players against the system, the new way of thinking of the NFL against the old thinking of the NFL. If what you want is to believe that the player does not have to lead his entire career in the economic terms of the league and teams, then Bell continues to fight. And that does not end until at least four months.
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