It is becoming clearer and clearer that no deal is going to happen with Donald....ever.....despite all the happy talk from our FO.
And I don't blame our FO; I congratulate them for their discipline.
The new word out there is "Player Control". I've been reading how a renewed contract for Aaron Rogers is being held up nearly certainly because he wants to be able to opt out of his contract after 2 or 3 years. Goal? To keep upping his contract price.
My bet is that this is one of the major sticking points for the AD contract. The other is probably guaranteed money.
But even if my bet is wrong, obviously whatever AD is demanding the Rams aren't buying.
I'm not down on AD for this. I understand both sides of the argument.
However, pragmatically the Rams are not in the player happiness business. Their job is to keep him for as long as they can for as affordably as they can, especially because he has numerous other teammates who are going to be up for BIG contracts soon. One point of the salary hard cap is to level the playing field and is designed for a team who has managed to aggregate a bunch of stars to lose some of them to (usually) lesser teams.
The Rams have AD under their full control for 3 more seasons (including this one) by employing the Franchise Tag. The smart move on their part is to maintain that control unless AD comes up with a reasonably affordable number (even if it is in the $20 mil range which I think the Rams will pay), but no way will the Rams ever agree to a giant number PLUS Player Control (player opt out). And simultaneously they must build their Dline depth to plan for the day that AD leaves. Might that mean trying to resign Suh after this year and moving Donald?
I'd say the odds of AD remaining a Ram longer than 3 more seasons are considerably less than even because likely there is a team willing to give him everything he wants and at the same time the Rams can't keep everyone they want to. With Goff, Gurley, and Peters coming up for big deals soon, keeping AD might not be in the cards.
Besides, if you're the Rams and you have decided that AD is going for broke and the suspected issues are real and insurmountable, why would you give up the control you have for 3 more seasons ( a huge amount of time by NFL standards) while making signing the other players more difficult? If AD is given player opt out, there is no way Goff, Gurley and Peters (and perhaps others) won't demand it as well. Salary cap control now becomes all the harder because precedents are hard to overcome.
