Best article on what happened in the Donald negotiations

On Khalil Mack, Aaron Donald and the Value of a Franchise Defensive Player

One gets traded, the other re-signs, and in the end both get paid big. For the Raiders and Rams, the behind-the-scenes machinations revealed contrasting strategies for dealing with their premier defensive players, and only time will tell which approach was the wiser.

Albert Breer

[www.si.com]

The words that stuck out most, from Khalil Mack’s introductory press conference in Chicago, were perhaps the most simple and concise. What, he was asked, was so attractive about the Bears?

“To be wanted,” Mack answered. “That’s all it takes.”

This week the market for defensive players was reset by the two truly generational talents to emerge from a loaded top half of the first round of the 2014 NFL draft. And the differing paths the two players, Mack and Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald, wound up navigating is explained almost completely by that single line from the newest Monster of the Midway in his first meeting with the Chicago media.

Donald was wanted by the Rams, and L.A. wasn’t going to let him go. Mack was wanted in Oakland, but only to a certain point, and that became clear quickly.

In February, around the time of the combine, the Raiders made an offer to Mack’s agent, Joel Segal. Segal counter-offered. So at that point, the Raiders definitely were ready to enter into a deal to keep Mack well past the planned 2020 move to Las Vegas, and Mack was ready to sign his future away to the only NFL home he’d known. Problem was, that shared willingness came at very different price points.

As a result, that was the end of it. And contact going forward was minimal.

It’s not as if the Rams and Donald didn’t have disagreements on value. They did. Their standoff lasted almost two years. But after not negotiating at all through last year’s holdout, as a matter of policy, the Rams kept the lines of communication, and negotiation, open this time around, and kept chipping away at a new deal.

Coach Sean McVay kept in contact with Donald. Team negotiators Kevin Demoff (the COO) and Tony Pastoors (VP of football and business administration) stayed in touch with CAA agents Brian Ayrault, Todd France and Rich Hurtado. 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.

“Aaron has earned the right to be on the Rams Mt Rushmore,” GM Les Snead told me on Sunday. “And the goal, what’s best for the organization is to make sure that occurs. That principle allowed to keep things very positive through the daily grind of trying to come to a long-term solution; We all took that approach, because the endgame was always make sure Aaron Donald is a Ram for a long, long time.”

You want to know why Donald is signed to his megadeal in L.A., without so much as a game missed, and Mack was being toured through Halas Hall on Sunday morning? It’s right there for you.

It’s why Donald arrived at the Rams facility on Friday afternoon to sign a new six-year, $135 million extension. It’s also why just hours after that, in the wee hours of Friday night/Saturday morning, the Bears called Segal, whom Mack happened to be visiting in New York, and said, “We have permission.” Segal’s response: “Let’s go.”

Consider the numbers, side by side, all of which were far beyond what any defensive player, or non-quarterback for that matter, has ever made.

Total new money APY: Mack $23.5 million; Donald $22.5 million.
Signing bonus: Mack $34 million; Donald $40 million.
Year 1 cash: Mack $41 million, Donald $40.892 million.
Year 2 cash: Mack $56.3 million; Donald $50 million.
Year 3 cash: Mack $73.3 million; Donald $67 million.
Total new money: Mack, six years, $141 million; Donald, six years, $135 million.
Practical guarantee: Mack $90 million; Donald $86.892 million.

Mack had an advantage here. He was working off a fifth-year option number of $13.846 million, and plays a position with higher tag numbers. Donald’s fifth-year option was only worth $6.892 million. So that can explain the discrepancy in numbers favoring Mack.

And that wasn’t the only thing differentiating the two. As the above illustrates, the two players were in very different spots. So with that as the backdrop, here are nuggets I was able to glean Sunday from the two situations.

There wasn’t a seminal moment in the Donald talks for the Rams, but four days (Aug. 5-9) sequestered in a Baltimore-area hotel for joint practices with the Ravens gave Demoff and Pastoors every reason to spend significant time on the deal. And while it really was just more chipping away if you were to somehow chart how this all went, Snead got a nice, positive vibe from his colleagues after the calls with CAA.

“That’s probably when I changed the script a little bit,” Snead remembers, “And said we were in the same zip code.”

As for keys, here are a few …

• The Rams were unwilling to talk, as a matter of course, during Donald’s 2017 holdout. They backed off that this time around, almost viewing Donald staying away more as injury risk management than any sort of wildcat strike. Simply, it was an acknowledgement by the team that this was a special circumstance for a special player, and that it didn’t make much sense to try and make a point by not talking.

• Another concession came in the structure of the deal: The Rams had been against funding guarantees in the past, but did so in this case, using a rolling structure that marries the club to the player for four years (very rare) at the aforementioned price of $86.892 million. Why were they more willing?

Well, one reason is because Jared Goff’s deal is the next foundational piece to take care of, and they’re going to have to be reasonable on guarantees in that one (based on the QB market), so holding the line on Donald, the best player on the team, just wasn’t worth it.

• Maybe the most interesting win for Donald—generally these deals are measured against the money left, plus what two franchise tags would cost, which represents the team’s leverage point. In this case, the number was around $40 million over those three years. Donald got $67 million over the first three years of his deal, which is a massive 68 percent hike over the aforementioned baseline.

• There was no deadline for a deal last week but the Rams and Donald certainly were cognizant of the lessons of last year. In 2017, he reported two days before the opener, missed that game, and really wasn’t quite himself for the two games after that. Both sides wanted to avoid having to endure a similar re-acclimation this year, so getting in ahead of game week was a goal.

And when it was over?

“It was, ‘Hey, we’re finally whole again, Aaron’s gonna be a part of this,’” Snead said. “That’s the first thing that crosses your mind—OK, all is right for the Rams for this moment. Obviously, there’s tomorrow and another adversity that’s inevitable, that we’ll have to deal with. But that’s the first thing, and then you do start daydreaming about some of the moves you made during the offseason to improve the defense.

“Those moves were made with Aaron penciled into the starting lineup on paper. When there’s an agreement, and he drives up your driveway, it’s no longer on paper, it’s on grass.”

It’d be wrong to assume that Donald’s deal frameworked what Mack and his people did a day later in Chicago. But there’s no doubt it had its effect on the proceedings.

Because the financial area that Donald and Mack sought to reach was uncharted by anyone other than the guys throwing the ball, the Raiders certainly had their right to believe that Mack’s asking price was crazy. And so for weeks, as teams inquired about his availability, they were met with a very firm no.

The tone changed as Donald and the Rams closed in on their deal. By then, Oakland knew what Mack was asking for was about to seem a great deal more reasonable than it had a few weeks before. And so as coach Jon Gruden would hand teams off to GM Reggie McKenzie (Gruden wasn’t kidding Sunday about not having dealt the second-rounder) late last week, those calling started to see Oakland not only as more open to dealing Mack. At that point, it seemed like they actually wanted to deal him.

So it was that the ball started rolling …

• As far as I can tell, among the teams involved, the Jets were the only ones close to what the Bears were willing to part with to get Mack. The Browns, Bills and Packers, among others, called, but this one was too rich for their blood.

• Mack’s resolve carried the day here. This was different from the Donald situation, in that Mack was on island and not communicating with his coaches on any kind of a regular basis. That could certainly get to you, especially when reporting would mean making $13.846 million for the season ahead. Mack didn’t crack, and that’s a credit to him.

• Gruden panned his roster to me last month and did it again at his Sunday press conference, and it colors why the Raiders were unwilling to go to the place they needed to in order to extend the 2016 Defensive Player of the Year. If you think you’re two years away, allocating resources into someone who may be 30 before you’re ready to seriously contend might not be the best idea.

• For their part, the Bears were monitoring Mack’s status all summer, and Matt Nagy was spending a ton of time late into the night in GM Ryan Pace’s office this week to discuss the concept of dealing for a potentially franchise-shifting talent. That was all facilitated, in part, by the rookie-contract-quarterback flexibility enjoyed with Mitch Trubisky, the same kind of flexibility that Seattle rode to a title in 2013 and the Rams and Eagles have worked to their advantage the last couple years.

• The key number for Mack: $90 million. That’s the guarantee he secured, and Segal and Pace and Bears negotiator Joey Laine were able to get there within 24 hours, which says all you need to know about what resulted from Pace and Nagy kicking tires on Mack. It’s also important here to know that the Raiders were never going there. Oakland’s brass and Mack’s camp did talk at the beginning of training camp, but unlike February, offers weren’t exchanged, a sign of how entrenched each side was.

The depth of the Bears’ investment, in fact, is probably even better illustrated by the Rams’ reasoning for going the extra mile on Donald. They saw what it cost the Giants to sign a player, Olivier Vernon ($17 million per), who wasn’t in Donald’s class, and what it cost the Jags to get a really good, albeit older, interior defensive lineman in Calais Campbell ($15 million per). And then there were the Saints, giving up an extra 1 to move up for Marcus Davenport on draft day.

In the Rams’ minds, it was worth going the extra few million per year, while saving the draft picks, to keep a player who was better than any of those guys and had been a model teammate and citizen to boot. The Bears? They went the extra few million and gave up the draft picks.

So it was a bumpy ride for Mack to get to this finish line. And there was last one kick in the junk he didn’t see coming. After spending the weekend with his agent, Mack flew Saturday from LaGuardia to O’Hare. His plane landed at 7:30 local time, and into a storm. Sure enough, the weather kept others from taking off, which meant his plane’s assigned gate was occupied by another plane in a delay.

Mack spent 90 minutes on the tarmac, not reaching his hotel near the team’s facility until around 10:30 p.m., where Nagy, his four kids, Pace and defensive coordinator Vic Fangio had come to meet him. Nothing in this saga came easy for Mack.

As for Donald? He flew private from Pittsburgh to L.A. last week.