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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Tuesday, June 4, 2002

Contracts in NFL not real deal

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columist

If this is June, then it is tell-the-truth time around the National Football League.

This is the week the clock strikes midnight on a lot of those eye-opening, too-rich-to-be-true contracts that have been making big headlines the last several years.

With a lot of the big names — and big contracts — being waived, it is one of two times each year (March is the other) when the realities of the salary cap system force everybody to come clean about funny money deals.

Take, for example, Green Bay Packers wide receiver Antonio Freeman. Make that ex-Packer because Green Bay yesterday waived Freeman, who is third in team history in touchdown receptions, not even halfway through his contract.

Nor was the man who has teamed with Brett Favre to be the highest scoring (57 touchdowns) active wide receiver-quarterback combination in the league alone in a salary cap purge that could claim a couple dozen high profile players by week's end.

It was less than three years ago that Freeman made headlines with the richest contract ever awarded a wide receiver. So lucrative was the seven-year, $42 million deal that it put him on the Wall Street Journal's NFL All-Star team, the payroll Hall of Fame.

Never mind that it was a contract made to be broken even before the ink could dry. Freeman, his agent, the Packers and, indeed, all of the NFL, knew — wink, wink — that the chances of Freeman completing the term of the contract were so small as to make the odds of the Cincinnati Bengals winning the Super Bowl look promising.

In the NFL, unlike major league baseball or the NBA, there are few guarantees when it comes to contracts. In baseball if, a year into a seven-year contract, a pitcher can no longer get anybody out, he is still paid the balance of his salary. Likewise, if he blows out an arm, the checks keep on coming.

However, the only portion of an NFL contract that is guaranteed is the signing bonus. That, plus whatever time a player actually spends on the roster is what he is paid for.

But the NFL contract charade continues. The numbers — $26 million here, $30 million there — roll on. Teams like it because it makes them appear committed to winning while not obligating them to honor a contract they can back-load and cancel at any time. And because they can tear it up at will, it gives them leverage to renegotiate a year or two down the road or grab a cheaper option.

Players go for it because it strokes their egos, and agents love it because the big numbers and splash that accompany them are useful in wooing clients.

So, cry not for Freeman, who — while he won't get the entire $42 million — might have realized, including bonus, $18 million over the course of the contract.

Just remember that the next time an NFL player signs a contract that seems too lucrative to be true, time will prove that it is.