The Detroit Lions are all about their draft and retain strategy. It's the thing that drives this entire roster right noe and in the future. The Lions want to be very good in the draft and they want to make sure they pay the guys they were very good about picking.
The problem with that is when you're too good at drafting, you get to a point where you have to make sure you get a lot of guys paid well. This is the situation the Lions find themselves in with Aidan Hutchinson, Kerby Joseph, Jameson Williams, Sam LaPorta, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jack Campbell, and Brian Branch. All these guys are at the top of their position and are expected to get the top of their position money.
In the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of Lions fans say stuff like this to me.
There are other variations of this, right? Stuff like "he loves it here" and "this is his actual hometown, why would he want to leave?"
I don't fault anyone for thinking this way. You hope that all athletes have some sort of emotional tie to the franchise just like you do, and at a certain level, I'm sure they do. But the hometown discount is a fallacy. Maybe it was real at some point, but it doesn't exist anymore.
It's not so much because of greed. I don't think it's evil in any sense like that. The reason athletes want to get paid is that they have such a short shelf life to do it in.
A lot of football players have maybe 10 years in which they make their money and then that's it. Then they're told they can't do their jobs anymore, and they hit the real world just like you and me.
If you hang drywall for a living and someone tells you that you can only do this for five years and then you're done, you're probably going to be looking to spend your time doing the jobs that pay the most instead of the ones where you're just helping out someone you know at a discount. You have five years to make money before you have to go figure out what life is after drywall.
For a lot of guys, they won't get their chance to make that generational wealth. For the guys who will get that chance, why would they blow it for less just stay in one spot when they're probably hoping they can make what the feel they're due while also staying in one spot.
Sure, you might hear the occasional story of a guy like Tom Brady taking a pay cut so the Patriots might sign someone, but that is rarely what it looks like. It's usually something to the effect of having some of his cap hit restructured into guaranteed money to open up cap space. He's still getting paid.
That's why when it comes to these extensions, you as a fan have to prepare yourself for multiple outcomes. The first one is that the Lions could sign all these guys, but this is going to mean they're not likely to be active in free agency like you hope they would be.
The next one is that the Lions are probably going to have to make some hard choices at some point, and this could mean that one or more beloved players leave or are just not brought back. It's a harsh reality in sports.
At the end of the day, I believe it's the former. The Lions find a way to pay all their guys what they're owed and they do it in a smart way that takes advantage of the markets. But don't expect anyone to take less.
