Quote:
Originally Posted by Chromeburn
This is the business side of things. Steelers trapped him with the tag but won't pay him what he wants. He played under it for several years.
From everything I have read Bell was great in the locker room and everyone loved him. Saying he was a great teammate.
Fans seem to take this stuff personally, but players know it is for a short time and they have a right to get as much money as they can. He believes he was outplaying what they were giving him. If he was underperforming no one would have a problem cutting him I bet.
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I’m guessing this will be an unpopular opinion, but I see no problem with the team repeatedly franchising the guy. Bell is part of a very powerful labor union which negotiated this arrangement with the teams, and the players then signed off on it. Nobody is taking advantage of anybody here. The team can keep its best player, but at a cost that is something close to a premium. And the cost of repeatedly tagging someone can be astronomical – look at what happened with Kurt Cousins in Washington.
Is it the same as the player would get from unrestricted free agency? No, probably not, but it’s still a lot of guaranteed cash. Most importantly for fans like us, it gives us some degree of assurance that our favorite players will be sticking around for the long term. How comfortable would you be if Luck could just up and leave the Colts once his contract expired? Even the mere prospect of the franchise tag can bring everyone to the negotiating table and often a long term deal gets done in the shadow of this possibility. I think the system currently in place has worked out well for everyone, all things considered.
As for Bell himself, I don’t like that he’s bashing his former team and celebrating their losses – it just doesn’t sound like he’d be a good influence. And on a more fundamental level, I’m concerned about paying so much for a 28-year old running back. As I mentioned in another post, his stats from last year are not as impressive as the Steelers’ current running back (James Conner), so is it the system or the player? Furthermore, RBs tend to peak in their mid-20s, so I don't like the risk that we would be buying into a guy on the downside of his career.