Usually, bad news gets tucked into the late afternoon hours of a Friday. For Packers receiver Davante Adams, it was a good-news dump, at least on the surface.
With one game left on his rookie deal, the just-turned-25 Adams signed a four-year, $58 million extension, with an $18 million signing bonus and a $32 million payout over the first two years. Yes, it sounds great. But what was the rush?
It’s one thing for Adams to sign a contract like that in Week One, when he had 16 remaining games of injury and performance risk. With Adams ruled out for Sunday’s game, the hurdles had been cleared toward the open market.
At a bare minimum, he should have waited until the deadline for the franchise tag came and went. Maybe they wouldn’t have used it on him, maybe they would have. The only way to know for sure would have been to wait until the window for using the tag closed.
If the Packers had tagged him, Adams would have made, based on the expected increase in the cap to anywhere from $174 million to $178 million, a one-year, fully-guaranteed salary of anywhere from $16.32 million to $16.7 million. Given that his new deal averages $14.5 million, why not wait to see if the tag gets applied?
Also, before taking the bird in the hand from the Packers, why not see what other teams would pay? Sure, it’s tampering for them to say so, but at the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis the tampering is rampant. Adams would have known whether some other team looking for a No. 1 receiver would have paid as much or more for his services.
Yes, there’s something to be said for the bird in the hand. Again, that mindset typically applies to NFL players when there are games to still be played under their current contracts. For Adams, it was just a matter of waiting for March.
Then there’s the fact that Adams currently has a concussion. Although playing football with a concussion and making important business decisions with a concussion may be two different things, it’s arguably a bad look to expect players with concussions to properly weigh the risks and rewards of taking an offer or waiting for a better one.
The fact that the player has an agent makes it less awkward. Still, it’s odd that Adams would decide with no games left to be played to take whatever the Packers were putting on the table now. Even if they huffed and puffed that the numbers would drop if Adams didn’t take the deal now, the reality is that if that much money was on the table months before real deadlines arrive, even more would have been on the table later.