Chicago Bears: Paying Matt Forte Would Be a Huge Mistake
Published by Phil Watson on November 16, 2011
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears
Running backs everywhere should be thrilled I am not a general manager in the National Football League.
If it were up to me, running backs would never get top dollar.
Adrian Peterson got a seven-year deal worth $100 million from the Minnesota Vikings. Great for Peterson, but the Vikings are still 2-7.
Chris Johnson’s six-year deal with the Tennessee Titans is worth more than $55 million and he got it after sitting out all of training camp. Combine that with the lockout wiping out the offseason program and what you have is Johnson currently ranked 34th in the NFL with 496 rushing yards. Yeah, that was money well spent.
Running backs don’t like to hear this kind of talk, but there is no one on a football team that is more replaceable than a running back.
The Green Bay Packers lost Ryan Grant, their “franchise” running back, in Week 1 last season. James Starks, a rookie sixth-round draft pick out of Buffalo, helped carry the rock all the way to a Super Bowl title.
Of course, Grant—an undrafted free agent out of Notre Dame—only emerged as a star after getting an opportunity to get some carries at midseason in 2007. That was after Green Bay sent a draft pick to the New York Giants at the end of training camp that year to get a guy that Big Blue was likely going to cut.
I bring this all up, of course, because there seems to be a national campaign to get a new contract for Chicago Bears‘ running back Matt Forte.
He’s currently playing out the final year of his rookie contract and will get paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 this season. Now, for ordinary folks, 600K is a pretty nice neighborhood.
But athletes’ salaries are public and as such they also become a declaration of a player’s perceived value. There’s no question that Forte is as big a bargain as there is in the league this year—$600,000 for a guy who accounts for roughly half of the offense? Sold!
But that doesn’t mean a franchise has to hamstring itself by committing $60 million or $80 million or $100 million to a running back.
Running backs have a shorter shelf life than milk left out in a sauna. All those blows to the legs that a back gets while working his way through the big bodies at the line of scrimmage can have a cumulative effect.
One day, you’re Earl Campbell, bulldozing everything in your path. The next day, you’re Earl Campbell, hitting a hole that could net a 20-yard gain and turning it into three yards and a cloud of dust.
It can happen just that fast, too.
For every Walter Payton or Emmitt Smith who remained effective for a decade or more at the running back position, there are 50 Tyrone Wheatleys: guys who put up numbers for awhile when given carries, but who after a couple of years of first-string work wore down and faded away.
Is that a guy in whom you want to invest franchise-player money over a long term?
The Indianapolis Colts had an opportunity to lock up Edgerrin James to a long-term deal long before he became a free agent after the 2005 season. The Colts let James get his money…in Arizona. While James got $30 million from the Cardinals, Indianapolis went with rookie Joseph Addai and journeyman Dominic Rhodes and won a Super Bowl.
James, meanwhile, went from averaging 4.2 yards per carry in seven seasons with the Colts to averaging 3.6 yards a tote in his three years in Arizona. By the time the Cardinals made their run to the Super Bowl in 2008—the third year of James’ four-year deal—he was splitting carries with Tim Hightower.
Pay Forte? Sure, pay him something. Just don’t wreck your salary cap situation for the next half-decade in the process because there’s a fair chance that within a couple of years, you’ll have moved on to the next running back.
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