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Off all the quotes from Darrelle Revis about his contract over the last few months, the most revealing one came in his hometown paper.
Based on what Revis said this week, back in the Pittsburgh-area, it sounds like he going to be a no-show for training camp.
A few weeks ago, there was an article in the Newark Star-Ledger, where Revis was basically speaking in tongues.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, he said a lot, but it was hard to discern what many of his points were.
He made very little sense. One Jets beat writer told us he would not have run most of those quotes. He also said, if he did, he might get a stop sign from his editor. Quotes need to make sense.
That Newark Star-Ledger article was a perfect example of Revis’ strategy this off-season – dance around the topic, but get the point across that all is not well with his contract.
But you know what, after a couple of months of quotes from Revis, at various spring camps in Florham Park, many of them very confusing, in my opinion, he said something this week, in his hometown of Aliquippa, that might have been his clearest statement yet.
He asked if he was going to holdout.
“I don’t know,” Revis told Mike Bires of the Beaver County (Pa.) Times. “That’s up to (Jets general manager) Mike Tannenbaum. I really don’t know.”
That quote is loaded with clarity and transparency.
Based on that statement, Revis is going to hold out.
He told Bires, and all the readers of that quote, in simple terms, if Tannenbaum doesn’t fix his contract, he’s not showing up.
Well, guess what, Tannenbaum isn’t doing anything about this contract, so expect a holdout.
A Jets source, perhaps Tannenbaum, told ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio, on Thursday, the Jets have “no appetite whatsoever” to give Revis a new deal right now.
I was just asked by a host in Boston, whose fault is this Revis’ contract mess, and I said both sides. I know that is a cop-up answer, but let me explain.
Revis and his camp are being disingenuous. They keep harping on the fact that he’s “only” making $7.5 million this year, and that is a shallow way to look at it.
Revis made around $16 million in the first two years of the deal, and now he’s making $7.5 million in the third year. Simple math tells us his three-year average is over $13 million a year. Not even Nnamdi Asogwa makes $13 million a year now. He makes an average of $12 million.
But the Revis camp absolutely refuses to look at the average – they are focused like a laser on the $7.5 million figure, and at that number, the Jets corner is making less than a number of other players at his position.
Revis claims this Jets called this deal “a band-aid” contract, and promised to re-visit it after two years. I can’t find any quote where anyone from the Jets used the word “band-aid.” Revis keeps telling the press a quote exists that doesn’t. Maybe something was said privately, but Revis keeps portraying it as a public statement that we can all look up. If it exists, I can’t find it.
At $13 million a year for the first three years (this being the third) of the four-year deal, his salary seems very fair.
But here is where the Jets messed up. Knowing the way Revis and his camp think, you don’t need to be a contract negotiator for a living to realize, that when the contract took a significant dip in Year Three, there was going to be a problem.
You didn’t need to be a visionary to see this coming. Clearly the contract wasn’t negotiated in the best of fashions. The Jets were asking for this mess the way they structured this deal.
So both sides are to blame.
And based on that quote from the Beaver County paper, expect a holdout, because if it’s up to Mike, and he’s not budging, Revis is basically telling us he’s going to holdout.
June 24, 2012
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