Last week (or maybe the week before... I don't re-read old posts. Hell, I don't even spell check the current ones,) I posted something about Chad Johnson probably staying in Cincinnati and Larry Fitzgerald being more likely target for a big Buccaneer wide receiver deal. Now it's looking a little different. Fitzgerald is stating openly that he wants to stay with the Cardinals, which is the first step to him actually doing it. Of course, his current contract is prohibitavely expensive, so he would have to work something out to lower that cap value. How expensive? According to PFT (who, for some reason, removed their permalinks again):
Due to escalators in his contract, he's scheduled to earn salaries of $14.59 million in 2008 and $17.355 million in 2009. That's nearly $32 million over two years, and then he'll hit the open market at only 26 years of age.
PFT also got it right when they said, "anything less than $30 million in guaranteed money as part of a new long-term contract makes no sense." That's a lot of money to spend on one player. One excellent player in a position of need for the Bucs, definitely. But wow... one injury is all it would take to make Bruce Allen look foolish for spending so much on one dude.
On the other hand, even though Marvin Lewis stated that Chad Johnson would be a Bengal for a long time, Johnson has been all over the airwaves making his case for other teams. Here he is telling Bill Parcells to call him. Here he is telling John Fox to call him ("DeShaun Foster would never see eight in the box," he says.) And here he is avoiding the question about where he will be next season. He may become too big a pain in the ass to keep in Cincinnati, and I'm pretty sure Chad doesn't care where he goes as long as it's not a bottom tier team and they're willing to pay him. The question there is, how much would Johnson cost?
Johnson signed an extension in 2006 which included a $5 million signing bonus, a $3.5 million second-year option bonus and reasonable salaries. In 2008, he is scheduled to earn $3.25 million in salary. In fact, the maximum possible value of his contract was $35.5 million, which includes a $6 million salary in 2011 on a team option (which they almost certainly wouldn't have exercised.) The point is that Johnson seems like a relative bargain compared to Fitzgerald. The downside is that Johnson has six years on Fitzgerald (Johnson will be 31 and Fitzgerald will be 25 when the season starts,) but it's not like Johnson is old or anything. Johnson has also shown that he can be a distraction for a team when he is unhappy, and that may be the biggest drawback. But you know he loves the game and when paired up with a quarterback who can accurately get the ball deep (sorry, Grads,) could make for a serious threat. And every time he opens his mouth in public about wanting to leave the Bengals, his trade value goes down a little because other teams know he's going to be bad for the locker room until he gets his way. I would give up the Bucs' second round pick without even thinking about it. First round? That might give me some pause.
If the Bucs are going to make a lot of noise in free agency this year as Allen said they would, they need to do it at wide receiver. It's one of the few positions where it isn't necessarily best to have a home-grown player on the field. Free agents work just fine. Find a way to make this happen.
