Christopher Miller discusses the pros and cons of Darelle Revis’ new deal.
For those of you who are NFL fanatics, the last month or so may have been rough — a month that was relatively quiet in terms of NFL news, statistics and highlights.
Thankfully though, the first day of NFL free agency recently passed last week and the entire league has been abuzz with free agent signings, trades and retirements since.
To cover all that has happened in these opening days of free agency, my column would probably need to be four or five times longer to adequately touch on all of it. Thus far, there have been shocking decisions, good decisions and just simply bad decisions made by individual players as well as franchises.
One of the first moves of free agency involved a new contract for standout cornerback Darrelle Revis. Most recently, Revis played for the Super Bowl XLIX Champion New England Patriots. Prior to Revis’s one-year stint with the Patriots, he was in Tampa Bay with the Buccaneers for a year and in New York with the Jets for the first six years of his career.
In 2015, “Revis Island,” as many called his personal bubble on the field, is relocating back to New York (or New Jersey to be exact), where Revis will begin his second stint with the Jets. The only question that remains is, was this a smart move?
Although the question is a simple one, the answer is not so simple. Whether or not Revis and the New York Jets made the right decision to join forces once again was good or bad depends on whose perspective you are looking from.
For Revis, it was a brilliant decision for a multitude of reasons. First of all, he gets to go back to the team he feels comfortable with, the team that drafted him and the team that he spent the first six years of his career with and experienced immense success with. It was there where Revis made his mark on the league as an elite corner. He has still been regarded as the NFL’s best CB in recent years, however.
It was also a brilliant decision for Revis because he got PAID! Revis’ new deal with the Jets is five years and $70 million ($39 million guaranteed, $48 million in the first three years). This deal is the largest for any cornerback in the history of the NFL.
In no way am I blaming Revis for taking such an extravagant deal. All of professional sports are full of lucrative, excessive and over-the-top contracts if a player has the talent. Revis certainly has the talent and he, and everyone else in the leagues, knows it. He knew his market value to a team was somewhere between $15 million and $18 million per year and that is exactly what he got.
From the Jets’ perceptive, though, I think it was a bad decision to sign Revis to the contract that they did. Sure, it will earn the organization brownie points with fans that still love Revis and wish he never left, but what are brownie points really good for?
At the end of the day, what really happened is, the Jets paid an incredibly large sum of money to an aging cornerback who will be 30 years old before the start of the upcoming season. In my opinion, Revis has already been showing signs of his age. Plus let’s not forget that his new contract will still have him in a Jets uniform at age 35. In my opinion, it is very unlikely Revis is still in the NFL at 35.
So, now we go back to the initial question, was this a smart move?
From Revis’ perspective, it absolutely was a smart move. From a fan perspective, Jets fans and Revis fans in general are elated. From a team perspective, it was costly financially and also carries substantial risk in terms of his age and injury history, but only time will tell whether or not this was truly a smart decision.
Christopher Miller is a junior studying broadcast journalism and sports management. Do you think these athletes will transfer? Let him know at cm001111@ohio.edu
