Lost amid the hand wringing in Philly regarding the decision of second-year receiver DeSean Jackson to hire agent Drew Rosenhaus is that the Eagle couldn’t use any of their remaining 2009 salary cap bulge on Jackson, even if they wanted to.
As Les Bowen of the Philadelphia Daily News points out, players can’t sign new contracts until they’ve got two seasons under their belts.
That said, the process of negotiating a long-term deal can commence now, with pen eventually being put to paper in March 2010. The Eagles have done it before, locking up over the long haul young players like Shawn Andrews and Mike Patterson.
The difference this time around is that the young player in question has shown more than high-end potential and middle-of-the-pack performance -- he has become one of the best young receivers in the league, and he’ll want something much closer to market value than what other young Eagles players have been paid on multi-year contracts about which many of them have gone on to complain.
How it unfolds remains to be seen. For now, Jackson isn’t doing driveway shirtless sit-ups, and Rosenhaus has yet to break out his trademark line.
“I’m not talking about anything today,” Jackson said earlier this week, according to Bowen. “I’m focusing on football.”
But if he were truly focusing on football, he wouldn’t have been thinking about changing agents in the middle of, you know, football season.