in the Wall Street Journal<\/a> you know everybody has too much time on their hands.\u201d<\/p>\nIn defense of those of us who may or may not have too much time on their hands, the reality is that the Higgins deal created a protracted standoff for the 30 second-round picks taken after Higgins. And the logjam didn\u2019t begin to break until camps began to open. <\/p>\n
“[P]hilosophically, when you look at, say, contracts in the second round specifically,\u201d Caserio said. \u201cSo when you look at the top of the second-round last year, I want to say like those contracts were 92, 93 percent fully guaranteed. Let\u2019s just fast forward, adjust for inflation, probably going to be some marginal increase. Let\u2019s say the number is three to five percent, right? So that small margin that\u2019s left, it\u2019s a difference of — it\u2019s not that much. You\u2019re all smart. You can do the math. Again, we\u2019re trying to get ahead and stay ahead on trends. Eventually probably going to get there anyway, so we just felt like that was the right thing for us to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what happened after that honestly, was a non-story that was made into a story, but everything kind of worked itself out. I think all of us in the league, myself included, have anticipated at some point, probably the first four, five you\u2019re going to end up at that spot anyway, so why wait around? Why bicker back and forth? Get to a resolution. I think people that know me and negotiate with me, I\u2019m a bottom-line guy. Let\u2019s get to the bottom line. Let\u2019s not \u2018hem\u2019 and \u2018haw.\u2019 If we think we\u2019re all comfortable, we\u2019ll move forward. . . . When I start reading about it in the Wall Street Journal, this is — it is a nothing deal.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s not nearly the same as the Browns giving quarterback Deshaun Watson a five-year, $230 million, fully-guaranteed contract, the Texans definitely broke from the existing trend by taking the percentage of the guarantee for the second pick in round two all the way to 100. And it\u2019s not about adjusting the value of the deal for inflation; that\u2019s already part of the slotting process. The percentage that becomes fully guaranteed is a different thing.<\/p>\n
For Higgins, it went from 91.9 percent to 100 percent. That\u2019s not nearly as insignificant as the three-to-five-percent bump Caserio suggested.<\/p>\n
In fairness to Caserio, it makes sense for him to act like it\u2019s no big deal. Given that the league and the Management Council do indeed care about the proliferation of fully-guaranteed deals, Caserio doesn\u2019t need to become the guy whom 345 Park Avenue shoots a side-eye for sparking the spike in fully-guaranteed contracts for players taken in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the extent that NFL teams collude regarding fully-guaranteed contracts, the Texans didn\u2019t get the memo. Or, if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-32102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}