Why is NFL Rookie Joey Bosa still holding out?
As a former NFL player, I look at the most recent and final offer the San Diego Chargers have given their first round pick, Joey Bosa and it makes me wonder what this guy is thinking.
The Chargers are offering him a $25 million contract and a $17 million signing bonus which is larger than any player has received in the last two drafts. He will get more money in this calendar year than every player in this year's draft except for QB Carson Wentz.
So what’s the sticking point in the negotiations? Is it money? Believe it or not, the answer is no. The Chargers want to hold off on paying a small portion of Bosa’s signing bonus until March 2017, but Bosa wants to be paid all the money by the end of the 2016 season. The Chargers initially offered to pay him 60% of the bonus money this year and the rest next year. The Chargers recently gave a final offer of 85% of the bonus this year and Joey Bosa, his agent and his mother said no. That’s right, his mother said “Wish we pulled an Eli Manning”
So it all comes down to Joey Bosa wanting all of the money NOW.
That blows my mind. Is he really going to sit out an entire season and re-enter the 2017 draft over this issue?
Rookie holdouts used to be a way of life in the NFL, with some first-round draft picks waiting while players drafted right around them signed their contracts. This was done in order to see what the market was paying and was obviously very useful in negotiations. In 1982 we went on strike and one of the issues we won was the right to make contract information available to all players and their agents. Joey Bosa should thank us for that. During my era before contract information was available, teams could hide what other players were making, giving them the upper-hand in negotiations.
In 2010, when active players were negotiating the CBA, former players stepped into the fray and asked veteran players to set a rookie salary scale and stop the insanity of paying unproven players - like Joey Bosa - outrageous sums of money before they set one foot on an NFL field. The active players got smart and finally established a rookie pay scale and now each pick is slotted within a certain dollar range, eliminating a lot of the back and forth negotiations that used to happen between teams and agents.
With the savings generated by the new rookie salary scale, the owners were able to give pre-1993 players a boost in their pensions. It also established a system for paying additional money to veteran players that were underpaid, but were getting a lot of playing time. It also prevented some veteran players from having to re-negotiate their contracts due to the fact that teams had to make room under the Cap for some rookie.
Antonio Gates recently told Bosa to "Man-Up.” Gates went through a similar situation in 2005, when he ended his holdout and signed a one-year contract for $380,000. "Eventually, I ended up saying, I need to get ready. To me, it meant a lot for me to go out and perform."
I’m sure it meant a lot to his teammates too. Just two days after he ended his holdout the Chargers rewarded him with a six-year, $22.5 million deal.
If Joey Bosa sticks to his guns and sits out an entire year, he’s making a big mistake. A lot can happen in a year. You can get rusty, you can get hurt and like a lot of players with time on their hands you can do something stupid like get in a fight, or get a DWI, or beat up your girlfriend because she says you have no money, etc. etc. etc.
If he re-enters the 2017 draft, he will have much less negotiating power because the team that selects him knows that he has to play and cannot even entertain the idea of sitting out a second year.
There is one other detail in the negotiations that needs to be ironed out. Bosa and his agent (and his mommy) want what is known as “offset language” taken out of his deal. Basically, this means that the team does not have to pay Bosa if he is released during the term of his contract and he signs with another team. Lots of teams take out this language, but right now the Chargers are really upset with Mr. Bosa and they are going all Super Nova on him by vowing to reduce their current offer.
Don’t get me wrong, the Chargers are being cheap and manipulative and according to Mike Freeman at the Bleacher Report, even a few of the NFL General Managers are laughing at the Chargers. Since the new CBA has been ratified, there has not been a No. 3 overall pick whose contract included both offset language and a split signing bonus.
Even though the Chargers are being stingy, it’s hard for a lot of older former players, like myself, to wrap our concussed brains around the fact that Joey Bosa is actually considering the possibility of not become a multi-millionaire with the stroke of a pen.
in 1979, I was so happy when I got my $20,000 signing bonus from the Buffalo Bills that I went out and bought my first car - a silver colored Monte Carlo. I called it the Silver Bullet and just a few months later I shot it up to my first training camp in Niagara Falls. When I finally had a chance to meet the Bill's owner Ralph Wilson, I went up to him said thank you for helping me buy my first car.
Boy, things have changed a lot since I played in the NFL.
