As Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis and his agents continue to attempt to push their way out of New York, some teams are becoming increasingly concerned about the prospect of doing business with Revis in the future.
As one league source has explained the situation, many teams love Revis the player but some are growing weary of Revis, Inc. The leveraging and the bullying and the posturing, which seem to have contributed to Jets owner Woody Johnson’s unwillingness to pay Revis again, is causing some teams to view him as high maintenance, selfish, and chronically unsatisfied.
The problem is that, through two contracts with the Jets, the leveraging and the bullying and the posturing have worked. Revis held out in 2007, scoring a slot-busting deal that teams and agents alike thereafter viewed as an aberration. Then, in 2010, another holdout resulted in Revis landing a contract that ties him to the team for four years and lets him walk away, free and clear, after the 2013 season.
Now, Revis wants another contract, from the Jets or from a team that will trade for him. But what happens when a new team signs Revis and he decides in two years that he wants yet another new deal?
It’s easy to say that won’t happen, that Revis and his agents are surely smart enough to know that, once he gets his next deal with a new team, they’ll need to behave differently. That if he finally scores quarterback money, he’ll have no plausible reason to complain.
But if the best deal he can get while recovering from a torn ACL doesn’t pay quarterback money, there’s a chance Revis will take what he can get for now and then, after re-establishing himself as the best corner in the game, try once again to get more.
If that’s what Revis does, his next team won’t be able to claim that it was a surprise.