Apparently, Tracy Porter’s newcomer status to the Raiders trumps Charles Woodson’s eight years of Black Hole seniority.
Porter has squatted on No. 24, the jersey Woodson previously wore in Oakland. And Woodson has yet to get it away from the first-year Raider.
“Right now, negotiations have stalled so we’ll work on that in the upcoming days,” Woodson told NFL Network on Tuesday.
What if the impasse lingers? “Well, I may have to petition to the league to see if I can just wear a blank jersey,” Woodson said, which is precisely what he did on Tuesday.
He won’t be wearing a Broncos jersey because the team and Woodson couldn’t work out a deal. Though Woodson never came out and said it was about the money, the message between the lines is that, indeed, it was.
“I came into the talks with Denver knowing exactly what I wanted,” Woodson said. “Even though I want to win a championship, I still want to make the business part of it right. Everybody talks to me as if they want me to come in and do all of these things but they don’t want to treat me as a guy that is going to do all of those things. Those talks of course broke down, didn’t happen and I left Denver and I got here to Oakland. . . . You can either take what they give you or you can say, ‘Nah, I’ll do something different,’ and that’s the way it went.”
And so he went to Oakland. Possibly in No. 24. Possibly in a different number. Probably not in no number at all.