Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who has gone way out of character with a book tour lasting far longer than Kramer’s coffee-table-book-about-coffee-tables junket, joined Pro Football Talk on Thursday to discuss plenty of stuff relating to his football team.
On one point, Coughlin was unequivocal."We want Victor Cruz to be a Giant, want him to be a Giant forever,” Coughlin told Erik Kuselias. “We have to have some patience here, everybody has to understand the circumstance. Victor is a restricted free agent, so there may be further negotiations to get to the point that both sides want to get to. We have to show some patience but we all want him to be here and I think he wants to be here. It’s a great story, he’s a great young man. It’s a wonderful circumstance that he brings to our team an undrafted player that makes a difference in this team’s performance and helps by virtue of a great year for us to go forth and win Super Bowl XLVI.”
Coughlin said that the team has no frustration at this point. And there should be none. The Giants have the leverage; they’ll undoubtedly tender Cruz at the first-round level, with a salary of nearly $2.9 million in exchange for the ability to match any offer made by any other team. With the restricted free agency market so weak in recent years to support reasonable suspicions of collusion, the Giants likely don’t have serious concerns about losing Cruz.
Especially with the Redskins strapped with $18 million in cap penalties for 2013, to go along with the $18 million in cap penalties imposed in 2012.