Refusing to ‘shut up and play’ pays off
Former Steelers stars Bell and Brown now among NFL’s highest-paid players
You heard the refrain last year from disgruntled fans and broad-chested NFL experts braying at you from the TV set:
These guys need to shut up and play.
They were often referring to Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown, two players who believed they were both tied down in bad situations with the Steelers. The cause was slightly different, but both were unhappy and both were vocal about it.
All throughout the chorus from afar was the same: They need to shut up and play. No NFL teams will reward this crap. They think they’re bigger than the game, but they’re not.
This week Antonio Brown was traded to the Raiders, from whom he received a deal that guarantees him $30 million. Le’Veon Bell announced he was joining the Jets, with Adam Schefter reporting the deal guarantees him $35 million.
So much for those “they need to shut up and play” arguments.
Bell and Brown took two different routes to get to their new deals but end up in the same place, more or less: Out of Pittsburgh, and among the very best-paid players in the game.
Brown feuded openly with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and was benched for a game while also making it no secret he felt the Steelers had signed him to an extension early in his career that locked him into a below-market deal.
Bell ended up sitting out the entire 2018 season after the team slapped the franchise tag on him for a second consecutive year, preventing him from getting a new contract in free agency or signing to a multiyear deal with the Steelers with guaranteed money that would protect him in the event of injury.
Bell broke the mold because, despite what the Steelers and much of NFL punditry thought,
he wasn’t bluffing. He told the Steelers if they hit him with a franchise tag he wouldn’t play. They did, so he didn’t.
In a different world, this would be celebrated as a victory for anyone who’s ever been forced into a bad contract by someone bigger and more powerful. But that doesn’t happen in this country much, and especially it doesn’t happen in the NFL.
That’s partly because we all want to play sports for a living and are jealous of those who get to and hate people who turn down the chance we all would love to have.
More important, the sheer dollar amounts make it all but impossible to see clearly what’s happening, and the NFL owners (and billionaires in general) in this country understand that. They know the difference between millions and billions is hard to comprehend, because they’re all big numbers and all far more than we have. They know they can paint millionaires as being ungrateful, because we don’t have that much, and it doesn’t matter if those millionaires are being underpaid or being squeezed out by an owner with exponentially more money, because they have millions of dollars.
The numbers are all too big. It doesn’t matter that people know NFL careers are, on average, just a few years long. They get paid more than we do, and they get to play a game we all love, and they should be happy about it.
Owners get this and tap into the fans’ jealousy and rage more than anything else.
These players are getting paid millions, and I’m not, and how dare they?
For the NFL lifers on TV, the refrain was slightly different but tapped into a different idea that owners love to push and general managers working under a salary cap are only too happy to reinforce: No one is bigger than the team.
By demanding better situations for themselves, the thinking went, Bell and Brown were showing themselves to be Me First Guys who would never fit in with the Team Culture of the National Football League, and
just you watch, Jim, no team will reward this behavior.
Even now people will quibble and say Bell could have gotten more if he had stayed with the Steelers, and I’m certain Pittsburgh will leak details of some contracts they offered him that may or may not be real. People will twist and contort and do whatever they can to justify the argument that Bell did wrong.
Here’s the long and short: Two teams went and gave contracts to two of the most gifted NFL players of their generation after they made it clear they wanted to be paid fairly by what the market dictates their value to be.
It turns out demanding what you’re worth won’t poison your NFL career. Eventually, it will get you what you’re worth.