Less than a week after Richie Incognito fired his agents via Twitter, Incognito made it clear that he has no reason to have an agent, since he’s retiring from the NFL.
And he’s retiring from the NFL only a couple weeks after agreeing to take a pay cut. Which means that he simply needed to refuse the pay cut, and he likely would have been cut.
As it stands, Incognito now will be required to return not only the $1 million he received up front as part of his agreement to slash his total compensation by $1.625 million but to pay back, potentially, the $1.15 million in previously-paid signing-bonus money that he was due to actually earn this year.
So why walk away now when he simply could have dug in last month and gotten a free ticket out of town, with no repayment obligation? The decision to retire from football, coming only days after he decided to fire his football agents, conjures memories of the erratic behavior in which he engaged after the Jonathan Martin situation resulted in a multi-game suspension in 2013.
Even while contemplating retirement, Incognito quickly went from being willing to play for the right price to not being willing to play at all. The next question is whether the Bills are eager to remind him that the total Bill for calling it quits will be $2.15 million.