NFL stars should use leverage to help society

David Johnson deserves a new contract before he takes the field for even one more snap, but we’re not making that case here today: He hasn’t earned that type of support.

Same goes for Le’Veon Bell, Julio Jones, Odell

Beckham Jr. and Aaron Donald.

This should be a defense of the little guy, an opportunity to draw parallels between working-class people and NFL stars. And it ought to be a chance to point out some hypocrisy in the structure of player contracts and an appeal for front offices to become models for a more equitable system. (OK, maybe it’ll still be that.)

All this comes up as Todd Gurley signed a blockbuster contract with the Los Angeles Rams on Tuesday: four years, $60 million with about $45 million guaranteed, including a $20 million signing bonus.

Johnson applauded the news on Twitter. The Cardinals star ended his mini holdout by reporting to camp this week without a restructured deal.

Bell congratulated Gurley, too. Contract negotiations involving the Steelers back have become an annual point of contention.

These two will likely benefit from Gurley’s deal, since it establishes a new baseline for how much star running backs get paid.

The implications for other high-impact holdouts aren’t as clear, but these guys have a lot in common.

They’re all outperforming their current contracts. They’re all better than any replacement player, which the Cardinals know all too well after missing Johnson last season because of injury. And they’re all black, which fairly or not carries a burden of social responsibility.

The issue of athlete pay has always been tricky.

This should be ... an opportunity to draw parallels between working-class people and NFL stars.

Why should any of us care what a player negotiates? What they eat doesn’t give us indigestion. And if teams can afford to pay players big money, then shouldn’t players be expected to go get it?

But the reality is that the jobs are so public and the numbers are so eye-popping that contract conversations take on new – and deeply personal – meanings.

Fans root for a guy to get a new deal because he can be cut if he underperforms. It’s unfair if a team can tear up a contract with little risk, but a player can’t.

They get angry and call a guy “selfish” if he makes so much money that it prevents his team from signing other difference-makers. Or they call holdouts “entitled” and scream for them to get to work because in the real world no one could get away with staging a one-man strike.

The opinions are as valid as any others, but they’re also nothing new – and they often involve race in a way that shouldn’t be ignored.

William C. Rhoden, an award-winning sportswriter formerly of the New

York Times, details many of the sticking points in the public debate surrounding player pay in “Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” which came out in 2006.

“Many of the themes – ownership, profit-sharing, inclusion without power – are as current, for better or for worse, now as they were (then),” Rhoden said in a recent phone interview.

The book makes the case, according to Crown Publishers, that black athletes “for all their money, fame and achievement … still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multi-billion-dollar industry their talent built.”

Rhoden said that while it remains “mystifying these conditions still exist,” he has seen progress “particularly with football players and basketball players gaining a sense of empowerment … more open to express themselves outside of X’s and O’s.”

And if any of these star holdouts had done that – by loudly and publicly working to improve their communities or seek social-justice reforms – then this would be a defense of their efforts to get every penny they can command.

To be clear, this isn’t to say they haven’t done that in quiet but influential ways. This is a call for such work to go beyond youth football camps and for it to be as visible as Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid kneeling on the sidelines to protest police brutality.

It’s a request for superstars to expand on the momentum generated by the players’ coalition, which secured nearly $90 million in funding for work to make society more equitable, and to capitalize on their opportunity to turn that abstract number into concrete changes.

And it’s an invitation for teams to support and promote that work by touting it as proudly as any other positive news they care to share – like when they give players well-earned pay raises.

Since we haven’t seen that level of effort from players in this group, they’re on their own to explain their positions to a public that largely doesn’t seem to care to listen.