It’s becoming more and more clear that: (1) teams aren’t as interested in running back Adrian Peterson as he expected them to be; and (2) he’s starting to get a little frustrated about that.
There’s no other way to explain his father’s decision to vent regarding the decision of the Vikings to not make Peterson an offer before deciding last Tuesday not to exercise the option on his contract for 2017. The Vikings actually did Peterson a favor, giving him a full and complete opportunity to determine, via impermissible tampering at the Scouting Combine and permissible tampering this week, to determine his market.
The problem is that Peterson’s market (if there even is one at this point) is nowhere close to where Peterson thought it would be. That’s why the news regarding Peterson is entirely one sided, with the player, his father, and/or unnamed sources close to Peterson identifying teams he’d be interested in joining but no one reporting that teams are interested in him.
Consider that for a moment. In this season of B.S. and fake news regarding team interest in players, there hasn’t even been a made up report about a team being interested in Peterson.
In lieu of venting at the 31 other teams that have yet to make Peterson a real offer (or a phony one), Peterson’s anger apparently will be directed at the Vikings.
His father most recently has criticized the Vikings for not making an offer before deciding not to pick up Peterson’s option. Peterson and his father apparently don’t realize that they likely would have been offended by any such offer, given the manner in which it would have compared to the $18 million Peterson was due to make this year.
The truth very well may be that the offer from the Vikings (assuming they even make one at this point) will be more lucrative than any other offer Peterson gets from any other team. But that offer may not come at all, especially with Peterson’s father firing shots and/or throwing shade at the quality of the Vikings’ offensive line.
“What we personally like is [the Raiders’] offensive line,” Nelson Peterson told Chris Tomasson of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “The offensive line, they haven’t been playing around. They haven’t been trying to get offensive linemen from the bottom of the barrel and trying to make them into something.”
Meanwhile, Peterson will be trying to make his free agency into something more than a low base salary with incentives. For now, the thinking is that he’ll have to choose between taking something far less than what he’s accustomed to getting, or not playing at all.