I know one thing and that is Ted Thompson does not have an easy job. How can you budget and plan when players are coming at you with this stuff and the trend seems to be it doesn't matter who or how long ago it was addressed the last time?

He gets slammed for not going after more FA's but players are free to renege on their deals even when escalators are kicking in on deals just done a couple years back.

I mean there is no end to it if players want to try and compare what they agreed to do two or three years ago to todays deals getting done. I wonder if things got tough and the contracts getting signed started getting lower how these guys would react if the team went to them and said "your deals not worth what it was two years ago and we need to lower it."

The problem is it never goes both ways and the contracts are always for more. Right now it's looking like Ted was very wise holding back what he did just so he can redo players deals even if they are getting way more now than they were.

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The smartest thing a GM and or Owner can do is not take a personal liking to any player. You can not keep a guy around just because he has been a face of a franchise.

The NFL is a business, and in order to win it must be run like one. I am a firm believer in that after some reading on the inside of the NFL.

An NFL team must move away from a player on a declining production curve regardless of how long he was with the team and or what he has contributed to the community.

That said... I know Donald is still productive enough now and will be this year... So I am not saying trade him for younger talent. I say he has a contract. Let him play through it this year and re evaluate the situation next year.

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I think this may be the best post you've ever written, sir. +1 to you.

And as for warhawk's post, I sincerely hope it happens. In an economy in which, by all projections I've seen, major employers like GM will be slashing their workforce from 60,000 to 38,000 by 2011 (and this from a company that used to employ 500,000 Americans!), I don't see how the contracts of professional can escape this curve for long. They have grown out of proportion to the rest of the economy and surely a correction must come.

We will know that sanity is returning to sports when rookie contracts of one year are lower than the equivalent contracts of the year before. I hope that day is soon.

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I don't have a problem with letting go of guys getting older that are looking for a payday from some team starved at a certain position. Hey, if some team is willing to overpay then let them go.

My problem is even the younger guys often want to leverage a certain position where they find themselves in that goes beyond just doing whats best for themselves at the time. I think this is a feeding frenzy initiated by agents that look at the Packers Cap Space and now are all singing in tune like a choir "pay my guy more."

Collins is apparently saying he had to sign a five year deal and the league went to four the following year so he's stuck waiting an extra year for a bigger payday. What kind of a croc is that? Like it's the Packers fault he wasn't born a year later.

That to me is an agent inspired excuse to look for a reason to try and get more which would be o.k. if he didn't have an escalator that jumped his salary like 10 times over last year.

I don't even know what the heck Driver is looking for after just redoing his deal in '07 and getting what he's being paid already.

I can see a guy like Tramon having a legitimate reason with a low base salary and no significant incentives to compensate solid play. He SHOULD have gotten a better deal but these other guys? I don't know about that now.

You have to wonder if it's even worth being in good shape with the Cap with all the stupid excuses these agents come up with to grab what they can. I just wonder if we had like a million bucks left if Drivers agent would even bother?

Which might bring into question the legitimacy of some of these "reasons" players want a different deal now.

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What a fascinating insight I had never considered. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between a team's relative cap health and the proportion of players it has demanding raises.

Thanks for providing us this chewy morsel for thought.

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heard driver is back

Impossible!! He wants a new contract!

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I am waiting for some jagoff reporter to try and find another angle or player that they can stir into a headline.. still haven't heard diddly squat out of Driver.. other than he is happy with his deal.

I hope someone "accidently" over runs a play at the practice open to the reporters and scares the crap right out of one of this clowns.. if I was a player, I probably won't speak to them either.

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Twitter-Driver is here-Woodson too 

I'm starting to think the staff is against me here. They know I'm stuck behind websense, yet continue to post links to photobucket, twitter, youtube, etc... I'm gonna beat you!!



Could someone who has access please post the contents of the link, please????

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