Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaka
Not sure if this will help illustrate the principle, but imagine you are a player with a contract that includes a $1M bonus for starting at least 15 of your team’s games in a season. You play well, but the team does poorly and ends up 4-10 heading into week 15. How would you feel if the team abruptly decides to bench you so they can start a lesser player just to avoid paying your bonus? When the time comes to negotiate your next contract, would you be interested in agreeing to such clauses? Perhaps more importantly, if you are a free agent considering several teams, and you learn that the Colts are treating players like this, wouldn’t that discourage you from choosing the Colts? Or at the very least wouldn’t that make you negotiate your contract differently with them?
The reality is that teams often bend over backwards for players in this situation. Even when the player legitimately doesn’t reach his incentive, but instead comes very close, teams often pay the incentive just to keep the player happy. Why would they do that? It only hurts them, and they’re not legally required to pay the bonus, right? That’s all technically true, but they pay it because they want happy players and they don’t want a reputation for being cheapskates who will take advantage of every loophole to screw over their negotiating partner (the player). It just doesn’t look good when you do this.
As fans it’s fun to see the Colts make a “good” trade where they get a lot of value without giving up much. But the truth is that in negotiating a deal with anyone, the best outcome is one where everyone profits – not one where one team dominates the deal, and the other team gets very little. If Carson Wentz plays well, even if the Colts have a bad season overall, you hand over the 1st round pick without hesitation. The Eagles delivered their part of the bargain, and so did the Colts. Everyone did well on the deal, and neither team will hesitate to work together again in the future.
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I get the salary comparison, but that one is not quite the same. For one small bonuses like that are a drop in the bucket for an NFL team's revenue stream. There's not much loss for the team if they have to fork over another million to a player for just playing him.
Now, what if there were some real tangible reward for the team to sit the player for that last game? Like the team gets more cap space the next year or something if player X doesn't hit his bonus this year. At that point how much would we see the honor vs. the team benefit?
The bargain in this case is Wentz playing 75% of his snaps. That's it. The hope for the Colts is that he would be good enough and they would be in playoff contention. So far the first part is true...so far the latter part remains to be seen if it's true. If they are in playoff contention in a weak ass AFC South in Week 11, yeah, of course you play him. If they are 1-9 then...why play him? At that point he could get hurt and then you run the risk of having a hurt QB (who was playing in meaningless games) and not having a very high draft pick to brunt the damage to yourself. And at that point the Eagles will have got a high second round pick, so it's not like they got screwed on the deal here. On no planet is Carson Wentz worth a Top 5 pick.