00:00Burt Breer is with us. Christian Gonzalez is not here today. Again, Burt, what are you hearing on this? What's
00:06the latest? The Witherspoon deal is done. The benchmark has been set. What's the holdup?
00:12It's coincider, boy. It's so rude.
00:18I don't know that there's been a ton of progress made. The framework is there, but the framework has to
00:26be there. The owner doesn't say what he said, right?
00:28What you have to understand is there's a half dozen different things that are really big elements to a deal.
00:36The Witherspoon deal, if you look at it closely, the guarantees are set up differently than McDuffie's. McDuffie's are rolling
00:46guarantees. Basically, what that means is his 20, 28 guarantees become guaranteed in 27.
00:53So if you cut him after 26, you have to pay for 27. If you cut him after 27, you
00:59have to pay for 20. So it rolls like that. So there's a huge penalty if you want to try
01:04to get out of any of the guarantees, which means it's virtually guaranteed.
01:08Witherspoon's isn't. So Witherspoon, like the last two years, are basically just injury guaranteed the third and fourth year.
01:15So for the Seahawks to keep their precedent there, they basically wound up putting a ton of cash in the
01:20first two years. So they gave him the two existing years of the deal. They gave him a $33 million
01:27raise over the next two years and guaranteed all of it.
01:30So it's stuff like that. And then I think the, the number, the big number 33 new money, like that
01:38was a compromise too, because it's, it wasn't breaking the market the way that he wanted to break the market.
01:44Like he wanted to go to 35, 36, but because they were going to get him as cash fast, they
01:49were going to get him just about 60 fully guaranteed in the first two years, which again was like a
01:53$33 million raise.
01:55And like, if he can stay healthy, like if he can, if he can stay at his level, which people
02:01trust he can one-on-one over the first four, he was willing to give a little bit on the
02:05bigger number, which is going to help the Seahawks keep other guys because they haven't broken the market with one
02:10player.
02:10So maybe they don't have to do it with the others.
02:11So you're saying in some regards, he folded on some things and exchange for, yeah, well, yeah, he did not,
02:19he did not hold out for that number of 35 or 36.
02:22And they were able to entice him to do it by giving him a lot of money in the next
02:26two years.
02:27And so like, basically the way you want to look at this, just the simplest way to explain it is
02:31teams want to be able to take contracts and hold them over other players' heads.
02:35Yes.
02:36And so this team would love to do it over Drake May next time.
02:38They have certain precedents they want to set with the big players that it's not even that important that they
02:44do it with that one player because they know that, like the Seahawks know, they trust Devin Witherspoon's going to
02:50be worth the money in 28 and 29.
Comments