Running back C.J. Spiller could have taken the balance of his fully-guaranteed $1.7 million salary from the Saints and waited for an inevitable injury to strike at the tailback position for a contending team in, say, late December or early January.
Spilled opted not to delay his return to the NFL, choosing to sign with the Seahawks, who have a short-term need while Thomas Rawls recovers from a leg injury.
Unless the Seahawks are paying Spiller more than $100,000 per week (and if they were, it surely would have been leaked by now), he’s essentially working for free. More importantly, he’s putting himself at risk of injury for no additional compensation.
That’s his right, but it still doesn’t mean it makes much sense. When Rawls heals, Spiller will have a hard time getting on the field -- and he won’t be available if someone else with a contending team gets injured. (Unless he gets cut.) Until then, Spiller risks the kind of injury that would make him less attractive to other teams in 2017.
For now, Spiller is getting up to speed in Seattle, where everything is new. It’s so new that he doesn’t know what his role will be.
“I just got here so we haven’t really got into that I’m still swimming I guess you can say,” Spiller told reporters on Thursday. “I’m still trying to get things learned. Places learned, the meeting rooms and all that stuff. So we really haven’t gotten in depth considering I just got here on short notice.”
Seattle may indeed be the right fit for Spiller, and it could work out perfectly for him. At a time, however, when there’s a push to get players to treat football like the business that it is, it wasn’t the best business decision for Spiller to return so quickly, for no more money than he already was going to make from the Saints.
Speaking of the Saints, they’re surely happy about this development. They’ll get a dollar-for-dollar credit for Spiller’s salary in Seattle. From the Saints’ perspective, then, it was a perfect business decision.