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Originally Posted by BigHairedAristocrat
i thought reid and JLC were just making all those rumors up. i guess all those reports were true after all...
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Those were blind guesses. This is a descision made recently by the Haynesworth camp. I've heard: within the last 48 hours. It might not be THAT recent, but certainly, not before the draft. That's just not accurate.
If anything, we have two enabling parties in what is now actually a story:
- the media, the Washington Post in particular, who created such a sustained negative backlash around Haynesworth that there's diminishing negative returns here with the backlash for this (substantial) decision.
- the contract by Cerrato, which essentially (as I noted right when it was signed) traded any leverage the team had with the player to the player within 13 months of it being signed. It's nearly impossible to recoup a significant portion of the contract. We can get $4 million in pro-rated bonus money back, but -- aside from fines levied on him -- we can't touch the $20 million we payed out in March, nor can we touch the $1 million portion SB that was accrued and recognized on the books in 2009, nor his 2009 salary. That's something like $25 million that Haynesworth gets just for playing those 16 games.
He leaves another $17 million or so on the table in the next two years by not reporting at all this year, if he chooses to do so, and that's like half of his guaranteed money, so it's substantial. But $25 million for 16 games was made possible by the leverage Cerrato extended to get him (which was a risk known at the time, not necessarily a reasonable expectation of failure), was probably necessary to get him in the fold, and the media was already railing on him for essentially doing nothing wrong (which is fact),
so it's really no skin off his back to not honor his contract if he doesn't feel like it.
Complete dick move by the Haynesworth camp, but the timing of the decision leads me to believe that level heads will, at some point, prevail.
The above is why you have his teammates going off on him now, and not before when he wasn't doing anything wrong, despite reports.