Revis Island

With the NFL season only a few weeks away, the league’s best shut down defender, is at odds with his team. For those of you living under a rock, we’re talking about the Jets Darrelle Revis, and the ongoing contract issues that they are having. Here is the dilemma the Oakland Raiders horribly overpaid a corner back last year, giving him 15.1 million as his annual salary, this guy, was a decent defender but nowhere near the level that Revis has performed over the past year, and he was rewarded with a contract almost twice as high as the next highest salary  for the elite corner backs of the league. After putting up numbers that had people all around the NFL declaring him as the best corner back, Revis, may or may not have been promised an extension by the Jets Hierarchy, but now they are at a stand still because the Jets do not want to pay him. So while other people are turning against Revis and saying he isn’t a team player, I would like to be one of the very first to say Pay that man.

Lets ignore the stats, for this one piece we do not need to go into how dominant Revis was this past season, lets just talk about a few key things that we know about the NFL. The first point being, that any team can cut any player at any time. There is no such thing as a guaranteed contract, that’s why you can have a situation like what happened with the Cowboys who one year gave Terrell Owens a three year extension, and then the following season cut him. Here is another fact, an elite player who has had consistent years of great numbers, who suffers an injury will be thrown right into the waste basket by the same team they have been loyal to for years, and when this happens it is considered business. If you need more examples of how heartless this industry can get, lets take a closer look at the Jets. For them we have three examples.

Johnathan Vilma– At one point he was being considered the future of their defense, their quarterback on the defensive side, then he suffers an injury, and they ship him to New Orleans for spare parts, after pretty much advertising in the media that he would never be the same player again.

Leon Washington- At one point he was the most dynamic piece to their offense, but when it came time to negotiate a new contract, the Jets balked, he finally signed for the non tender,  got injured and they shipped him away as well.

Thomas Jones/ Alan Faneca – This is the most recent so it cuts the deepest of the three. We will start with Thomas Jones. He has been the leading rusher, as well as one of the most vocal and loved players in the locker room from the moment he became a Jet, he has also been one of the toughest and hardest workers on the team. His grit was rewarded by being cut earlier this off season. Alan Faneca may not have as glamorous of a position as Thomas Jones, or Darrel Revis, but he is by far one of the main reason, the Jets have had such an effective running game over the last few years. But after luring him away from Pittsburgh with a long term deal, they cut him three years into it, to make things worse, he found out that he was cut while having dinner with friend and now former team mate Nick Mangold.

Darrelle Revis Highlights

I know we as fans would like for our players to be as loyal to us as we are to them, but if the team will swallow them up and spit them back out why should they have to be the ones who take it. This isn’t like the situation with A-Rod and the Yankee’s. Where A-Rod opted out of his contract during the World Series, and wanted a raise from the Guaranteed 252 million that he was making to a 300 million. Revis wants a contract that pays him the money that he deserves, with a big signing bonus, because for those of you who don’t know nine out of ten times, the signing bonus is the only real money from that contract that is usually guaranteed. Lets be honest, even if Revis gets the contract he wants, he probably will not make it to the end of that deal, because this is the NFL and if you have one down year, your team will drop you faster than an old sack of potatoes. Revis has every right to try to cash in now when he has the opportunity to, because someday he’s knee’s will be all beat up, and he wont be able to cover as well as he used to, and when that day comes, whatever team he is on will happily cut him and send him on his way. But the New York Jets will still be making money. So as I said in the beginning, Pay that man