On Wednesday, Shutdown Corner’s Frank Schwab did a great job of updating the Joey Bosa situation — namely how the San Diego Chargers made this standoff public and ugly.
And though it has been common for many in the media to slam the team and side with the player, there is one undeniable fact: Bosa doesn’t have a lot of leverage here.
Oh, sure, these are the Chargers we’re talking about, and calling them a well-run organization might not be able to be done with a straight face. The fact that their local stadium issue hovers over them like a pother of California smog doesn’t help public-relations matters either.
Perhaps the Chargers, coming off a 4-12 nightmare of a season, could have found better ways to get this thing done — especially in an era where the draft-pick holdout has gone the way of the Edsel. Bosa also reportedly looked good in OTAs, and the team openly spoke of its big, immediate plans for the rookie. Had Bosa’s reps pushed this thing sooner, maybe then they could have spurred the team to come up faster. But with the moratorium for a trade now in place, Bosa can’t be dealt, per the league’s CBA.
With the season on the brink, Bosa’s leverage has passed. He has no options now, really; he must sign with the Chargers to maximize his future options.
Unless he’s prepared to sit out the season and lose money — or sign later this year and make less now — he has to take the Chargers’ best offer, one that they say has now passed by the wayside (although that’s unbelievable). If Bosa sat out 2016, he’d have to reenter the draft and go through that whole spin cycle again, and there’s little chance he’d come close to making the money he would if he took the Chargers’ latest offer.
He’d lose a year’s worth of earning power, which for a young man who recently turned 21 could be an extremely powerful thing. There’s also a very good chance he would not be the third pick in the draft again. If the 2017 NFL draft was held today, I bet Texas A&M’s Myles Garrett would go ahead of Bosa. Bosa was a surprise at the No. 3 slot and might have fallen past the Dallas Cowboys at No. 4, and who knows beyond that?
Bosa could fall to the fifth pick next spring and get similar money to what he’d get this year. Dante Fowler Jr., who was picked third in 2015, signed a four-year, $23.49 million deal with the Jacksonville Jaguars, which included a $15.34 million signing bonus. Compare that to the Jaguars’ Jalen Ramsey, the fifth overall pick this year, who signed a four-year, $23.35 million contract, including a $15.18 million bonus.
A negligible difference, you say. But consider the time value of money. Bosa could earn a paycheck in 2016 and hit free agency a year early — even if the Chargers picked up his fifth-year option, he’d be a 26-year-old pass rusher on the open market. Even younger than Von Miller when he held the Denver Broncos’ feet to the fire this offseason and ended up with a $114.5 million deal that will pay out $70 million guaranteed over the next 18 months.
Ask Bosa if he’d take that arrangement. The big picture matters as much as the short term in this case. The fact that the Chargers are asking Bosa to do something no other top-five pick this year was asked to do is immaterial. They know, as a non-quarterback, he has no real options. Really, he has no choice but to hope the Chargers’ last offer stands.
The interesting thing is that even fellow players on other teams know it. If you want to argue that the Chargers’ initial offers were lowball, that’s fine. You’d likely be correct. There’s little doubt their hard-line stance in the early going set this relationship down the wrong path to start.
But they’ve come up — quite a bit, in fact — and now are offering only 15 percent of the deferred signing bonus if Bosa and his agent agree to the Chargers’ demands of accepting “offset” language. It’s a reasonable offer, and they should be close, but it doesn’t feel that way. Despite the Chargers’ supposedly firm stance, the assumption is that if Bosa bit hard and said, “OK, have it your way,” he could still get the last-and-best offer from the team.
What the offset means is that Bosa can’t double dip if the Chargers decide that they have no use for him in Year 5, failing to pick up his 2020 option at an average of the 10 highest salaries at Bosa’s position, and they’d have to make that decision prior to his 24th birthday. How likely is that? If they don’t want him and foolishly give up on him that early on, someone else will.
Not being able to double dip and earn salary from both the Chargers and another team would be a tough pill to swallow, sure. But losing out on a year of earning power is far and away the worse option.
That’s why Bosa’s leverage, which once was in his court, is now gone.
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