We've got a while until July 4th, but the fireworks are already flying at Jets camp.
Darrelle Revis showed up for Jets minicamp on Monday but still found a way to register his displeasure with the tenor of contract negotiations with the team. Revis sat out a good portion of practice, initially complaining about a hamstring pull an being light-headed before admitting that his real concern was the lightness of the Jets' recent contract offers.
"I talked to secondary coach
Dennis Thurman about it too," Revis said. "We joked about it. He knows where I stand and what I believe in... I can't control what the
Raiders paid
Nnamdi Asomugha. But he set the bar... I don't have to be paid that much, but me and my team are going to fight for that...To me, it's like an insult... you sending me stuff with not guaranteed money in the contract. That's not good."
No, it's not good at all and it doesn't figure to get better for a while. There are many people to thank for that, starting with Raiders owner Al Davis for giving Asomugha a ridiculous $15 million per season contract and creating an unrealistic bar for every other good cornerback in the league to shoot for when they are looking for a new contract from their current team. No other cornerback makes as much as $10 million per season but Crazy Al doesn't care about such things when he's negotiating against himself.
You can also thank Revis and his agents for not accepting that ridiculousness for what it is and setting their own expectations at a more realistic level, especially when Revis has $20 million in guaranteed money available to him in 2011 and 2012 under his current deal. The Jets have hardly been unfair to Revis up to this point in his career so it's not really useful to accuse them of being cheap when the Woody Johnson era has been mostly filled with criticism of his penchant for spending wildly and unwisely. Those critiques include the rookie deal given to Revis, by the way.
Most of all, though, you can thank the Jets for once again making verbal promises that they don't seem to be willing to back up. There was no point in going public with lavish praise for Revis and near guarantees of a new contract in the days following the end of the playoff run if they weren't actually going to see it through to conclusion. If Revis is telling the truth about a lack of guaranteed money in the team's contract offers, that's worth a double damning because it doesn't actually qualify as an offer if there's no chance that it would actually be accepted.
Johnson and his front office are damned if they do and damned if they don't in some ways. Every time they sign a free agent, they're accused of being profligate and trying to buy a title in the vein of Redskins owner Daniel Snyder or George Steinbrenner of the 1980's. If they don't accede to Revis's demands, they become overly thrifty and unwilling to do what it takes to keep players happy. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
An unassailable part of that truth, however, is that the Jets have always seemed to be more willing to spend money on players from other teams than on players who were already in
New York. That's something that seperates them from most of the teams that regularly contend for titles in the NFL and something that they're going to have to change to keep this Revis mess from damaging their chances in 2010.
