Negotiations can be a tricky thing in professional sports. Teams try to sign players while also knowing more players will need to be signed in the future and players and agents hoping to get what they feel they’re owed.
That’s why 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan felt the need to let Brock Purdy know how he and the team felt before negotiations began on what eventually would become the quarterback’s five-year, $265 million contract extension.
“I knew how hard of a position we were in,” Shanahan told Tim Kawakami on “The TK Show.” “I also knew that me, John [Lynch] and Jed [York] wanted to keep Brock here and we wanted him to be our guy. I also knew were in a tough financial situation which I can’t totally explain, but I would say to Brock, ‘You’re probably going to see it in free agency and it’s not going to be fun, but I want you to know, our goal, we all feel this way about you.’ ”
Another piece to the contract situation was the fact that Purdy still was under contract with San Francisco and hadn’t entered NFL free agency.
“But when you’re in that situation and you have a guy you don’t have to pay that year, he still had a year on his contract, you don’t have to do anything and you think completely from a business standpoint and just finances and where we were, why would we do anything right then?” Shanahan said. “If you only think that way, well, the reason we want to is because I want you to be our guy, John does and so does our owner, so we’re going to work to find that and I hope you know that and I hope you trust that through this whole thing.”
At the end of the day, Shanahan wanted Purdy to know how important the team sees him as a player.
“There is a business aspect to it which makes things hard,” Shanahan said. “But he needs to hear how I feel about him before they’re negotiating and he takes that personal.”
Luckily for the team – and Purdy – the deal got done, and the two sides can continue to harmoniously move forward together.
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