There’s so much information flying at Eagles fans right now, it feels to me like you’re a cornerback and your zone is being flooded…
I don’t buy into the common lament of most football writers who complain the lockout has given them “nothing to write about”…
There’s almost too much info to assimilate properly or objectively, in my humble opinion…
Look at all the unanswered questions surrounding the Eagles… Will there be a “normal” training camp? Will the Birds be able to re-sign K David Akers, or LB Stewart Bradley? Safety Quintin Mikell? Backup RB Jerome Harrison? Punter Sav Rocca? Or even nickelback Dimitri Patterson?
What happens if Kevin Kolb is traded away, and who will be the QB#2 then?…and what other FA signings (if any) will be accomplished within a very narrow window of time?
And what if an abbreviated training camp session bleeds over into an underachieving first half of the regular season? What will be the provisional plan if things seem to be going off track after the first 8 games?
Last Thursday was a critical point. If the sides could not advance negotiations from there, then the possibility of hundreds of millions of dollars being lost to canceled preseason games was real. And if the owners allowed the impasse to get that far, what was to stop them from testing the players’ pain threshold by extending the lockout into the regular season?
However, as SI’s Jim Trotter reports, De Smith had established his own secret lockout fund for the players in case of a lost season. It basically was a $200,000 insurance policy from a labor slush fund payable to each NFL player if the 2011 season was lost…
With talks reaching this critical juncture, De Smith and his proxy, Domonique Foxworth, revealed the existence of this secret lockout fund for the players…. “Want to go nuclear, bosses? We’ll ride out the winter right with you.” That was the message.
And they try to tell me there’s nothing to write about in this lockout?
Fortunately for us as fans, this chess-move knowledge of a labor slush fund might just have been just enough to wear down the last bit of bravado the Owners had, and get pens tantalizingly close to paper, ending this lockout once and for all.
It still doesn’t solve the logistics problem of a dwindling time window for Free Agent transactions, undrafted rookie signings and the essence of a meaningful training camp…
Does Stew stay or does he go? This is the kind of question that would have been answered long ago if not for the bloody lockout…
It’s a mixed-up crazy world right now…
Evidence of this insanity is gained by looking at the recent NFL Network’s Top 100 Players Poll….
Did anyone else notice that of the so-called Top 100, a completely askew salary schedule in the NFL was totally out of synch?
If we examined how GM’s around the league viewed value, by seeing where they allocated cap space and salary, it was a total non-match…
Guys like Derek Anderson and Jake Delhomme show up on the Top 100 “Highest Paid” list….and how how ridiculous is it that Philip Rivers was 26th in total compensation? No way he slips out of the top-10 in a real draft…
Maybe that’s the real story here with the end-game being played out between Owners and players… they’re just beginning to get on the same page with regard to who and what is worth what… and that involves more than a little financial shock value on both sides.
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