Murphy: Cox, Sproles strike familiar poses

IT WOULDN'T take many modifications to turn The Thinker into The Holdout. The posture, as exhibited by Darren Sproles and Fletcher Cox on Wednesday afternoon, is actually quite similar to Rodin's masterpiece: a muscular man, hunched forward in a sitting position, elbows on knees, face angled toward the ground, ignoring everything around him. All it's missing is a cellphone in the left hand and a locker in front. Oh, and a pack of reporters gathering at his back, although that part doesn't require nearly the level of detail as the rest of it (in fact, you might want to find a material other than bronze).

Do all of that, and you've sculpted the pose with which football reporters are typically reintroduced to holdouts. In most cases, the player holds it until he can no longer stand the feel of a crowd watching as he texts back and forth with his buddy about Life of Pablo. At that point, the subject rises, turns to face his voyeurs, and says let's get this over with. Then the crowd spends a few minutes asking questions that it knows the subject either can not or will not answer. And then the holdout is over.

Anyway, that was Wednesday afternoon. Cox did it, and then Sproles did it, and when they were done, none of us was really any better off than we were before. That's usually how it ends up going. It's one of those things that just has to be done. When there are legitimate questions to ask, you have to give them a chance to get answered. In the cases of Cox and Sproles, both players confirmed that they were in good shape, ready to work, and happy to be where they were (all of which will presumably remain true for the foreseeable future).

"When I got here on Monday, I got the playbook, and I'm a professional athlete so it was my job to dive straight in," Cox said.

Sproles: "I'm good. Everything is good."

Again, that's how it usually works. These things don't often end with shirtless situps in the driveway. Cox is getting paid north of $7 million to play football this year. Sproles will collect $3.5 million in salary on top of the $3 million signing bonus that he collected in 2014 when he signed a three-year, $10.5 million deal with the Eagles. At the end of the day, that's plenty of incentive to show up for work.

Really, from a pragmatic standpoint, the only thing that matters is that every member of the roster is present and accounted for. No team in NFL history has ever fallen two OTAs short of a Super Bowl. Once upon a time, first-round draft picks used to skip half of training camp while negotiating their contracts. In most cases, absence is nothing more than a diplomatic procedure, a formal airing of a grievance. Had they decided against attending this week's mandatory minicamp, there might have been some reason to think that the situations could have an impact on the Eagles' ability to win games during the regular season. As it stands now, the NFL is a strange universe where players very rarely have leverage to exercise, and thus they must make do with micro-aggressions like holdouts that aren't really holdouts. Duly noted, their bosses said. And then everybody fielded some questions and got on with their lives.

From a human-interest standpoint, there is a bit of intrigue with regard to the Sproles situation, at least when compared to Cox. Cox's maneuvering was pretty much standard operating procedure for a player hoping for a contract extension while heading into the last year of a deal. His side has a number in mind. The team has a number in mind. If you aren't volunteering any more cash than is currently contractually obligated, then I'm not volunteering any more time than is currently contractually obligated. Sproles, on the other hand, did not make public the concessions he hoped to gain from his employer. There were nebulous reports in the national media of some type of dissatisfaction, though nothing concrete. He attributed his absence to "family stuff."

"I don't know where all those rumors came from," said Sproles, who said he maintained contact with the coaching staff. "People just writing stuff, I guess."

Unlike Cox, Sproles is at a point in his career where the second hand can swell to a deafening tick. For a guy who went to a conference championship game in his third season in the NFL and hasn't been back since, the ability to win might be more important than a renegotiated contract.

"We've gotta get back to the playoffs," Sproles said. "We haven't been to the playoffs in what? Two years? We've gotta get to the playoffs, that's our first goal. Then, when we get to the playoffs, we're gonna come back and make another goal."

After that, there will be another offseason. Until then, we're back to football as usual.

@ByDavidMurphy

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