Patrik: Allow me to begin by saying I am, have been, and will always remain an advocate for players getting as much as they’ve possibly earned in a league that only promises them the rep they’re participating in at that exact moment, and literally nothing more. The onus is on the team to balance the books, not the player, thusly, “helping the team build a winner” is what GMs sign on to do … not players … and the salary cap isn’t as rigid as [too] many believe (hi, Rams and Eagles). But, to answer your question, if I’m a player, I have to be wise enough to know what I don’t know, and what I don’t know is what I pay my agent and attorney to know, but that doesn’t mean players “don’t have much say” in a contract they have to agree to.<\/p>\n
Yes, players have a ton of say, but they also have their own respective variables to consider (i.e., family, spouse, children whose future are all more important than anything, if we’re being honest). If I’m a player, yes, I want to be on a winning team and I’d likely make a concession or two to see that through, but I’m not cutting my legs off at the knees to help anyone’s front office do the job they signed up to do, which is to build a championship roster. Just as players should be willing to agree to a concession or two, so should teams, and fans should look at it from both sides and not simply the angle of “he’s just being greedy” simply because they want what they’ve earned; and there’s no guarantee anyone that the team they stay with or leave for will be successful.<\/p>\n
Everyone laughed at DeMarcus Lawrence for leaving to go to what, in the moment, looked like a laughably bad team, but that worked out for him in a big way. The NFL is unpredictable, at best, so players should do what’s best for them, and teams should do what’s best for them, and both sides should try to see if what’s best for both exists at the same time, and in the same way \u2014 the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patrik: Allow me to begin by saying I am, have been, and will always remain an advocate for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753925,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2066],"tags":[230,229,257,2461,7,417,4661,1900,420,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-753924","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas-cowboys","8":"tag-cowboys","9":"tag-dallas","10":"tag-dallas-cowboys","11":"tag-dallascowboys","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-news-all-news","14":"tag-news-mailbag","15":"tag-news-nick-eatman","16":"tag-news-patrik-walker","17":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116074992453273047","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}