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David Deacon
The money per year is a smidge higher than I thought. I figured it would be in the 20-22 range. I always thought AD would get a very high guarantee. He 18% higher than Miller which seems reasonable for setting a new standard. DT may not be a premium position as after the Suh, Short and Cox deals prices seem to have come down for DT. QB market has seemed to skyrocket recently with Rogers and Ryan contracts. 2 positions going in opposite directions.
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I never saw Donald as getting paid as a DT. In fact the Rams, whenever they mentioned the deal or talked about signing him, did not discuss him as a "top DT." They always referred to him as a top defensive player, or best defensive player... the semantics differ a bit but the concept is the same. They were paying AD as one of the top defenders in the league, a category I've seen called "best defender" even though (paradoxically) there is more than one player in that category.
Considered as a "best defender" Donald's touchstone was Von Miller's contract from 2016. Before that, Watt's contract from 2014.
This is why you most frequently see AD's contract compared to either Von Miller's or Mack's or both. That's why you yourself mention Von Miller. If you read around about the contract, both before and after it happened, no one is comparing it to DT contracts. It's always "best defender."
The best defender thing may not be official but it's real and dictated both what the compensation would be and how the deal would be discussed.
As good as the best ones are, no one on the current DT list compares to AD. He's just in an entirely different class all by himself.
And as Albert Breer stresses in his new (and very good) article on all this, the issue was cracking the qb market for a best defender, not for a mere DT. He puts that directly:
The deal was never going to be easy—the market for defensive players hadn’t moved in three years—but the mutual intention to reach a solution was never in question. [
ramsrule.com] . "Three years" refers to Von Miller's 2016 deal. Now if you read that too literally and misunderstand it, it's actually saying something crazy. Literally, "the market for defensive players hadn’t moved in three years" would not be accurate, because CBs are getting more in 2018 than they were in 2016, and so are DTs, and so on. But that's not what he's talking about. He means
top defensive players regardless of position in comparison to quarterbacks.
The idea is repeated when he says this:
the financial area that Donald and Mack sought to reach was uncharted by anyone other than the guys throwing the ball,. Notice he links Mack and Donald together as doing the same thing and being comparable regardless of position. And notice what he's stressing is that this is a case where 2 "best defenders" were asking for money normally thought of as going to quarterbacks.
Breer just assumes things others directly say: that in talking about Von Miller, Donald, and Mack, we're not talking about a DT and 2 LBs, we're talking about 3 "best defenders." Its own category.
There are a lot of quotes out there illustrating that. And that's how the Rams talked about the contract too.
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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2018 10:15AM by zn.
