I run a business operation and I would figure out what I think Reed would be worth and I would tell his agent that's my offer take it or leave it. But I wouldn't play the low balling shell game/offer/counter offer you speak of. This is just the way I operate. If Reed doesn't agree to my price I walk away. But the price would be at or above market for a HOF like Reed.
Texans have fixed income, steelbtexan. It's called a CAP. It's fixed. Go over it, you pay a penalty (ask Jerry Jones and Daniel Snyder).
To work within the cap, the front office must account for a crazy amount of things that may or may not happen.
It's not Low-balling, as you say, to offer what you WANT to pay a player. You're making an evaluation and your offer reflects several things: (1a) What you'd like to pay, (1b) what you'll pay because you are flush with tons of cash to spend and have to get rid of it due to new CBA rules, (2) what you cannot pay no matter what, (3) what you cannot pay unless you reorganize other expenses (re-structuring contracts) (4) what the player is worth on the market given many variables, and (5) incentives you think you can offer that other potential teams cannot offer to that same player. That's just 5, but I bet there's 200 more I'm not thinking of.
On the flip side, the player has his own evaluation of the process. (1) What am I worth?, (2) What could I get anywhere else in the NFL?, (3) Would this potential employer I'm meeting with be a good place to put my efforts into?, and about 200 other things that are probably more important than that.
So look, these two sides had to come together. It's not like they meet once he gets off the plane, shake hands at Reliant, and walk into a room and sign a contract. That's what our fantasy situation would be: Dude arrives, dude is excited, dude signs...press conference at 3 p.m. that day! That's what's going on with a lot of people's interpretation of the events. People have a problem in today's culture with WAITING. What are we, a Microwave Minute Society? This is what we've become in America: "Hey, I got a meal ready in under a minute here with my own microwave....why would it take 15 minutes for my pizza to arrive? That's horrible. I want my money back. You could have had it here in 12 minutes, easily." Bitching over 3 minutes. Complaining that things take too long. Demanding instant gratification.
Look, all in all you've got to realize that this isn't like signing a 3rd string OT named Andrew Gardner. The top of the crop takes longer to harvest, especially when you're up against the cap. Teams way under the cap? They can overpay and get a deal signed faster. This goes back to item 1b in my first list above.
Acting like we should have been prepared to pay Ed's supposed asking price, before he even arrived in Houston!, and that AJ should have had everything lined up with the front office before Ed's visit, I don't get it. Does anybody else think that way? Speak up. How can you, as a team in the NFL, go ahead and say "We'll pay you pay top dollar...just come down and put your name on this contract!"...I mean, why wouldn't you have the obligatory face-to-face meeting, get to know one another like they DID, by the way, and THEN discuss terms like everyone else does??? It's a negotiation, for pete's sake. It's a discussion, a meeting, and then things continue onward or they don't.
So now there's wind of AJ maybe reaching out and saying he'll do what it takes to get Ed Reed here. Had that all happened prior to the Ed Reed visit, Ed walks in and it's 100% guarantee that Ed gets every dime he wants. Hell, he might ask for MORE on top of what he was originally going to ask since he knows the original amount he had in mind is already there waiting for him via AJ's re-structure.
This is a business. Some teams dick around and treat it like Madden video game (i.e. Jerry and Daniel of the Cowboys and Redskins) flinging cash and throwing caution to the wind, contract structures and ramifications be damned! And some teams, like ours, are working within the cap and taking this thing slowly and methodically. At the end of the day, I just think people are too damn impatient about it all. It ought to happen and if it didn't happen then somebody in the FO is a boob. That's bad analysis.
