Bell playing expensive game
good faith involved when doing contracts with the Steelers. They don’t guarantee large sums of money beyond the first year. The way they structure contracts, it becomes cap-prohibitive for them to sever ties with a player until the later years of the contract.
So as much as Bell wants to believe signing a longterm contract is akin to playing year-to-year on franchise tags, really it’s not. The Steelers don’t operate that way.
The best way to illustrate this is the way the Steelers handled the second contract for center Maurkice Pouncey. The Steelers signed Pouncey to a fiveyear, $45 million contract in the summer of 2014 when he was coming off a seasonending knee injury. When Pouncey had another season-ending injury in the summer of 2015, the Steelers stuck with him, and he has been a valuable and durable player since.
Whether that’s because the Steelers have strong faith in the players they develop or whether it’s due to the way they structure contracts — they would have taken an $18 million dead cap hit in 2016 had they cut Pouncey — the bottom line is they don’t make a habit of cutting injured players and certainly not in the early years of the contract.
Assume the Steelers were willing to pay Bell more than $30 million guaranteed over the first two years on the contract again this year. That means Bell is betting $15 million that he can get through another season without a major injury.
Bell is fond of saying he’s betting on himself, but in reality, he’s betting against another major injury.
That’s where the debate starts. As noble as it might be, is Bell putting other players before himself?
Bell gets more touches, and as a result takes more hits, than any other player in the NFL. Last season, he touched the ball 406 times.
Last season, for the first time in his career, Bell was fortunate enough to play a full 16-game season. He wasn’t as fortunate in his first four seasons.
As a rookie in 2013, Bell was injured in training camp and missed the first three games of the season. In 2014, he had a seasonending knee injury in the regular-season finale and missed the playoffs. In 2015, he had another major knee injury in Week 8 and missed the rest of the regular season and the playoffs.
In 2016, he missed four games but none to injury. He missed three on a drug suspension and another to rest in the regular-season finale. He missed most of the AFC championship because of a groin injury after playing through the pain in the playoff games that preceded it.
Bell has not missed a start due to injury the past two seasons, but that is a trend that might be hard to maintain. Injuries in the NFL are a fact of life. That was never more obvious last season when a number of star players, including Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Houston defensive end J.J. Watt, had season-ending injuries. There were many others, including running backs.
Arizona running back David Johnson, who will be in line next for a big contract, had a season-ending wrist injury in Week 1 last season. It happened on his 11th touch of the season. Dalvin Cook, a firstround draft pick by Minnesota last year, had a seasonending knee injury in Week 4. It happened on his 85th touch.
Bell made it through almost 750 regular-season touches the past two seasons without a major injury. It’s easy to make an argument that he has been lucky to avoid another major injury given his usage.
In Week 14 last season, in a Sunday night game against the Ravens, Bell somehow escaped injury after absorbing a helmet-toknee hit by safety Tony Jefferson. Bell was hobbled, but he continued to play. Truth be told, it wasn’t a whole lot different from the hit by Bengals safety Reggie Nelson that ended his season in 2014.
Will Bell be as lucky the next time it happens?
That’s the issue for Bell as he prepares for his sixth NFL season. Clearly, he deserves credit for finding ways to stay healthy. There is a certain art to learning how to absorb hits and take falls. But Bells knows as well as anyone that there is no defense when a 250pound defender flies into his knee at full force when his foot is planted.
It is admirable Bell would like to blaze a trail for Johnson, Todd Gurley, Ezekiel Elliott and the rest of the next generation of running backs who want to get paid for their running and receiving skills. But someone close to Bell might want advise him that it’s also OK to think about himself, too.
It’s probably not his agent, Adisa Bakari, who thought Bell was going to sign the long-term deal that was on the table last summer. If not the agent, then who will be advising?
Bell will win this standoff if he gets through another season unscathed. Some team with a lot of salary cap space might pay him $35 million to $40 million in guaranteed money in a long-term contract next year.
In that scenario, Bell’s gamble pays off for him and the younger running backs in the game. But if not, Bell won’t be just another running back coming back from injury that’s hitting free agency a year from now. He’ll be a 27-year old with an even longer injury history and lots of wear on his tires.
And that $15 million will be long gone.