Gaines Adams Will Probably Be Overpaid On Time

Stephen Holder echoes the sentiment around league circles that rookie contract negotiations, and specifically Gaines Adams's, will be necessarily adversarial in his blog entry, "Let the standoff begin".

Negotiating a deal with first-round pick Gaines Adams will be a thorny process given the expected value of his contract.

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The goal will be to get Adams to camp on time, but don't expect a deal anytime soon.

Holder dismisses the fact that the Bucs have already signed two draft picks well ahead Bruce Allen's previous years' schedules. To me, this is a good indication that the team is beginning the process early and is making an extra effort to make sure everyone is in camp on opening day. Contract negotiations for higher draft picks are, of course, longer because of the amount of money and expectations involved, but that's the case every year. At least Holder doesn't use the words "hold" and "out" in his entry.

I think the bigger issue here is why teams are paying so much to rookies in the first place. Seriously, how long can the system handle the pay disparity between rookies who haven't played a single snap and veterans who have several years of service in the league? Courtney Brown, Gerard Warren, David Terrell, Joey Harrington, Mike Williams (either one), Robert Gallery; the Edsels of the NFL made more on their rookie signing bonuses than better players will make in their careers. And the disparity between the contracts of top ten draft picks and the veteran minimum is getting wider every year. Prideful veteran football players aren't going to let that continue indefinitely. They'll demand that the veteran minimum is increased to make up at least a little bit of that gap. And you know the owners won't support a salary cap increase to accommodate that. So the money will eventually have to come from the rookie allocation.

It only makes sense. Rookies are paid solely on potential and hype. A good combine these days can net a player millions without even making him run a position drill. But the odds are pretty much the same that a top ten pick will be a bust or an elite player during their NFL career. Looking at the drafts from 1997-2005, 27 players can be considered great at their positions while 25 are legitimate busts. The rest are somewhere in the middle. It's hard to blame a fourth round pick like Asante Samuel for bitching about his paycheck because he knows the money is out there. He saw Pacman Jones make more in guaranteed money as a rookie than he did in his entire contract. Wouldn't a first-year pay scale be nice? A way for rookies to prove they are worth the slot they were selected in rather than having guys like Akili Smith and Peter Warrick and Charles Rogers walking around with millions in the bank long after they've exhausted their uselessness in the league. I have read (PFT had a good write up about it a while back, but I can't link to it) that agents are the biggest reason it wouldn't happen because the agents of the top picks like those big bonus checks themselves. But the cap wouldn't shrink! It just means that more of that rookie money would be distributed to more players and therefore more agents. Agents with lesser-known clients should band together and push for a reasonable rookie salary to be implemented. After that first year, several of the top picks would prove that they, in fact, suck out loud and would get considerably less than they would have under the current system. And the ones that prove themselves as elite would be paid accordingly.