No Amount Of Money Could Buy Haynesworth

June 26, 2009 at 09:42am by Scott   •  2 Comments »

Reader Mark S. was the first to send me a note about the statement Albert Haynesworth made regarding his decision to go to Washington instead of Tampa despite the fact that the Bucs offered more money. I appreciate all the tips since by the time the story broke I was responding to all my “Did you hear Michael Jackson died?!?!?” texts. The only shock is that it didn’t happen 20 years earlier, people. He’d have been remembered as a god if he had just sucked on a 16-gauge as soon as the Dirty Diana video wrapped. Instead, now he’s the weirdo kid-toucher who hung babies over balconies by their feet and had to sell his amusement park home and flee the country with blankets over his childrens’ faces. Hell, Michael Hutchence took the dignified way out compared to Jackson. And stop telling me “But Thriller was such a great album!” Of course it was. And O.J. Simpson was a great running back.

Sorry. I’ve obviously been talking about this for a while now. Back to Haynesworth.

“They offered me a whole lot more, and even with their tax situation, it could have been 20 percent more. But you look at Washington, they’ve got a lot of the pieces together. They’re right there. They’re in a huge market. It’s one of the largest markets in the world. You’ve just got a large, huge media outlet and it can be life beyond football. Going to Tampa, I mean, great city. Looking at it from the off-season standpoint, I love the water. I love to be out in the sun. It’s just awesome, but it would’ve been like another Nashville. Tampa doesn’t have that big market and they don’t have a huge fan base like the Washington Redskins do, so I think it was just a choice just to look at it that way.”

This is a well-crafted statement made to appeal to Redskin fans. “Other teams offered me so much more money, but Washington has the best fans in the world! You can’t put a price on that!” It really shouldn’t be a shock that he said something like this.

When he signed with Washington, Haynesworth mentioned that the Great February Purge didn’t help the situation, either.

“You couldn’t really say that, but cutting a bunch of those guys and having a bunch of new starters didn’t help the situation any.”

The only thing that’s a little strange is that Raheem Morris said specifically that the bidding got too high for Haynesworth’s services and the Bucs bowed out.

“We did make a bid for Albert (Haynesworth). It didn’t work out. We felt it went past our limit where we wanted to go, where we were comfortable going and we didn’t go there. We feel good about that.”

Morris isn’t the general manager, so he may not have been privy to all the dealings that were taking place. But if we’re to take everyone at their word, it seems that Haynesworth really didn’t want to come to Tampa and no amount of money was going to sway him. Haynesworth mentioned it would have been a 20% increase over Washington. He’s guaranteed $41-million now, so he’s saying he passed up over $49-million guaranteed, which shatters the record for money in the bank. And Haynesworth loves money, so he got a real bad vibe from Tampa.

It’s kind of sad that the Bucs’ reputation took such a hit in the span of a few months. Jon Gruden was a master recruiter and could cover up any perceived flaws the Bucs had with his charisma — long enough to get free agents to sign, anyway. Now the Bucs are ranked as the #24 team by fans who voted on NFL.com, the lowest-ranked team with a winning record for 2008. But maybe now the talk that Mark Dominik didn’t try hard enough to land quality free agents can stop. If no amount of money can buy a player who is all about the money, there’s more wrong than Dominik can fix by himself.