Holdout or not, Eagles paying price for laughable Curry contract | David Murphy
Howie Roseman delights in conflicting reports about Brandon Grahams possible holdout, but hes the one who overpaid Vinny Curry and gives Graham a strong case for a new contract.
THE ANSWER to whether Brandon Graham deserves a new contract depends on large part on your definition of the word "deserves." From an originalist's perspective, the concept has no application in the realm of contract law: If you willfully entered into a legally binding agreement with another party, you deserve whatever terms are listed above your John Hancock and nothing more. Blame yourself or your counsel, but a deal's a deal.
On the flip side, those who accept precedence will tell you that, in a labor market like the NFL, there is very little that is willful on the part of the player, and, thus, you deserve whatever it is your employer is willing to give you. From the entry draft to the rookie wage scale, the collective bargaining agreement is set up to maximize the amount of risk a player must assume before he obtains any actionable leverage over his employer. On the rare occasion a player finds himself in possession of such leverage, he is a fool not to act.
Whichever side you come down on - and there are viable arguments for both - one thing that isn't in question is whether the Eagles deserve their current predicament. They most certainly do.
In the wake of the Inquirer story that broke the news that Graham was contemplating a holdout in order to facilitate a new deal, general manager Howie Roseman went into full deflection mode, following up a wave of anonymously sourced denials with an appearance on a team broadcast partner's radio show in which he said nothing and wasn't pressed to say anything more.
Q: Has he given you any indication he's not happy with his contract?
A: He has personally not done that.
Q: Has his agent?
A: Um, again, I don't want to go into contract discussions, but Brandon's been unbelievably positive about his role on this football team, being here, and I don't get any dissatisfaction at all with him.
Thanks for stopping by, Amarillo Slim. Maybe next time we'll get you to crack.
The reality of the situation is that this is the way business works in the NFL. We are a long way away from this becoming a critical wrinkle in the narrative of the Eagles' 2017 season. As Roseman alluded to earlier, it was only a few weeks ago that Graham was representing the Eagles in front of the media and talking about how he was looking forward to becoming more of a leader to fill the void left by the departure of well-respected veteran Connor Barwin. And it is difficult to imagine a player with his mixture of passion and determination creating a situation that lingers into the NFL calendar's formative stages.
At the same time, the Eagles are in a situation where they will have to take some kind of hit, whether it is to their salary-cap situation, or to the legitimacy of the hearts-and-minds campaign they've waged since the end of the Chip Kelly era. Really, the current Graham situation began in those first few months after Kelly's firing, when the Eagles announced a series of contract extensions that included a eyebrow-raising deal for one of Graham's fellow defensive ends. In his first four seasons with the Eagles, Vinny Curry had been on the field for less than a third of the team's defensive snaps and was coming off a season in which he'd finished with just nine tackles and 3.5 sacks. Yet in early February 2016, the Eagles signed him to an extension that this year will see him draw the sixth-highest salary among 4-3 defensive ends in the NFL.
Graham, a first-round pick in 2010, signed a contract before the 2015 season that paid him $13 million over its first two seasons and will pay him $6.5 million this season. Curry's contract will end up paying him $18 million over two years, with a third-year salary of $9 million that the Eagles can avoid by cutting him and taking $6 million in dead money.
That's a rather steep difference, even after accounting for inflation. Graham didn't get his contract from the Eagles until after he hit the open market and very nearly signed with the Giants. At the time, he had yet to establish himself as a cornerstone of the Eagles' defense - he has made his greatest impact over the last couple of seasons - but he still had more starts, sacks, snaps, tackles, etc., than Curry had at the time of his extension. And, now, he is one of the Eagles' best players on defense, coming off back-to-back seasons in which he was on the field for three-quarters of the team's defensive snaps, and Curry still looks like little more than a situational pass rusher who could enter another season as No. 3 on the depth chart.
Whether any of that means the Eagles should accommodate Graham is another story. As of Thursday, Roseman said he was more interested in the conflicting dispatches issued by reporters, all of whom had, by that point, undoubtedly contacted him in search of comment in response to the initial news of Graham's disaffection.
"My favorite part of this story is the media-on-media crime, and watching it from 10,000 feet," he snickered. "I do get joy from seeing that."
Which is understandable. Because when you're an executive who has not won a single playoff game in the seven seasons at the helm and who this year will waste $9 million of cap space on a defensive end who has never started a game, you learn to appreciate joy in whatever form it can be found.
@ByDavidMurphy