THE DEAL: Four years, $52.5 million with $35 million guaranteed
GRADE: C-
If you could go back to the summer of 2018 and tell Bell
that his holdout would net an offer with an average annual salary just north of
$13 million in free agency, would he be excited? My suspicion is no. I don't
think his gambit to pass on signing a $14.5 million franchise tag from the
Steelers and sit out the 2018 season worked for a number of reasons.
Bell's new deal comes in lower than most observers would
have expected by just about every measure. He got $5 million less in his
extension than Gurley picked up from the Rams, and that was a deal signed
with two years of cost control left before L.A. even got to the possibility of
a franchise tag. Even more surprising, though, is that Bell's deal averages
just $125,000 per year more than the three-year, $39 million extension David Johnson signed
with the Cardinals before last season. Johnson had one year left on his rookie
contract, had just one year with elite production, and was coming off of a
season in which he went down with a dislocated wrist in Week 1.
If you slice the $14.5 million Bell left on the table out of
the contract, you might instead call this a four-year, $38 million deal. That
would still make Bell the leagues third-highest paid back behind Gurley and
Johnson, but it would leave him closer to the likes of Devonta
Freeman than it would to Gurley. Bell's deal can reportedly hit
$61 million with incentives, which would get him over the $15 million per year
number that was commonly thrown around before this free-agent period, but it's
unclear how likely those incentives are to be hit.
As CBS Sports' Joel Corry noted in February, given the five-year,
$70 million deal Bell reportedly turned down from the Steelers, he didn't make
this new contract work. Since he was already in line to make $14.5 million on
the tag, he rejected an offer that would have paid him an additional $55.5
million over four seasons. Not only did Bell pass up the $14.5 million from the
tag, but the offer he ended up getting on the market didn't even hit what the
remainder of Pittsburgh's offer would have been on a long-term deal.
Bell might respond by pointing out that Pittsburgh's deal
didn't have the sort of guaranteed money he was hoping for. As I mentioned when
breaking down the Antonio Brown contract, Pittsburgh traditionally
guarantees only signing bonuses in their deals. Bell would likely have had a first-year roster bonus in his deal, which would have added
extra guarantees, but the Steelers would not have come up with an
offer that would have actually guaranteed the $35 million he will get from the
Jets without totally breaking away from their typical contractual structure. As
we saw with Brown, that wasn't going to happen.
While Bell took a year off and was able to rest his body
from the wear and tear of football, Corry makes a good point about the aging
rate of halfbacks. Bell essentially traded his age-26 season, where he was
guaranteed $14.5 million, for a shot at adding time to his career and having a
fresher season after his contract is up. Veteran backs on the wrong side of 30 rarely
get meaningful money in their deals, and it would be tough to imagine a
scenario in which Bell ends up getting $14.5 million for his age-31 campaign
after this deal is up.
Corry suggests in his piece that Bell would have needed to
come away with a four-year, $72.5 million offer in free agency to make his
decision to pass up Pittsburgh's offer worth it. Bell came up $20 million
short. He will sleep just fine at night with this offer from the Jets, and it's
going to be an afterthought when we talk about Bell's career a decade from now,
but if you're wondering why his market wasn't as robust as he expected, let's
run down the reasons:
1. THE STEELERS RUSHING' ATTACK WAS JUST FINE WITHOUT
HIM. The best thing for the 27-year-old's market value would have been
if Pittsburgh's offense had collapsed in his absence. That didn't happen.
Pittsburgh's offense averaged 25.2 points per game, up from its 24.4 points per
contest in 2017. It declined in offensive
DVOA, but only from third in the league to sixth.
The Steelers inserted James Conner and
then Jaylen Samuels into the breach, and the duo outperformed
the Bell we saw play out the franchise tag in 2017:
- Bell
in 2017: 4.0 yards per carry, with a first-down percentage of
23.1 and an EPA+ percentage of 40.5.
- Conner/Samuels
in 2018: 4.5 yards per carry, with a first-down percentage of
25.5 and an EPA+ percentage of 44.6.
EPA+ percentage is the percentage of carries each back had
that added to the expected points the Steelers were likely to score on their
respective drives.
Pittsburgh did have to change its offense to account for
Bell being gone. It threw the ball more frequently, calling for passes on 67.4
percent of its snaps last season as opposed to 58.4 percent of the offensive
plays in 2017. The Steelers also missed Bell as a receiver, although Conner
caught 55 passes for 497 yards and averaged 7.0 yards per target, which was
better than the 6.2 yards per target Bell averaged in 2017.
At the same time, if we can even make a credible case that
the Steelers got similar production from two backs who made a combined $1.1
million in 2018 as Pittsburgh received from a franchise-tagged Bell in 2017,
there's no reason to split hairs. There's no question the smarter teams in the
league looked at how Pittsburgh operated without Bell and thought that he was
less impactful after looking at the offense in his absence. (The same might
very well be true for Gurley in Los Angeles after C.J. Anderson's
late-season run.)
2. BIG RUNNING BACK CONTRACTS TYPICALLY DON'T WORK OUT. Too
often, teams that sign backs to hefty contracts end up regretting the deal
and/or get similar production from another back on a much cheaper deal when
their star is unavailable. The Rams enjoyed an excellent half-season from
Gurley to start his new extension, but once the former first-rounder missed
time with ankle and knee injuries, Los Angeles signed Anderson off the
free-agent wire and saw him post similar production for a fraction of the cost.
The Rams are going to be in the Gurley deal for a while, and he's
unquestionably a great player, but they didn't really suffer in his absence.
Johnson averaged 3.6 yards per carry for the Cardinals last
season. Freeman played in two games for the Falcons. LeSean McCoy averaged
3.2 yards per rush with Buffalo. Jerick
McKinnon, who took home $12 million in the first year of his deal
with the 49ers, never suited up for the team after tearing his ACL. Undrafted
free agent Matt Breida averaged
5.3 yards per carry while battling injuries in McKinnon's place.
It's hard to find a big running back contract in recent
years that worked well. The Vikings got an MVP season from Adrian Peterson's
deal, but he missed nearly two full seasons with injuries and a suspension and
had a third hampered by an ankle injury and a torn ACL. Arian Foster missed 23 games due to injuries over three
years during his extension with the Texans. Chris Johnson averaged 5.0 yards per carry in the three
years before his extension and 4.1 yards per carry in the three years
after. DeMarco Murray lasted one year in Philadelphia before
turning into a salary dump. Doug Martin was
one of the league's worst running backs after signing his extension with the
Bucs. DeAngelo Williams never topped 1,000 yards after signing
a massive deal to stay in Carolina.
Marshawn Lynch is probably the best-case scenario for a contract
extension after this current collective bargaining agreement was signed, but
he's the exception to the rule.
3. AVAILABILITY IS A CONCERN. Paying something
in the range of $15 million per year to a great running back is one thing.
Paying that much to a back who isn't on the field is lighting money on fire,
and there are legitimate concerns about the new Jet's ability to line up for 16
games. He has done that only once in his pro career, although Bell would have
made it twice in five tries if Mike Tomlin hadn't sat him for a meaningless
Week 17 game in 2017 against the Browns.
Excluding that rest game, Bell has missed 16 games over five
NFL seasons with various injuries, most notably a torn MCL. The ailments also
prevented him from contributing to Pittsburgh's playoff runs in 2014 and 2015.
He also has been suspended twice by the NFL, first for a DUI arrest, and then
for missing multiple drug tests. He had the latter suspension knocked down from
four games to three, which would then mean that a subsequent suspension would
only count as a four-game penalty as opposed to a 10-game ban, but any team
acquiring Bell would be worried about the possibility of another suspension.
4. THERE AREN'T MANY TEAMS THAT NEED RUNNING BACK HELP
RIGHT NOW. When you consider that Mark Ingram, Tevin Coleman and Jay Ajayi are all still free agents, the running back
market is flooded with supply against limited demand. How many teams really
have a hole?
I saw only four teams that could justify making a serious
play for Bell because they need a starting running back: the Jets, Raiders,
Buccaneers and Washington, who don't really have the cap space to add Bell
after giving Landon Collins a deal with significant money in Years 2
and 3. The Raiders spent their cash on hand on Antonio Brown, Lamarcus
Joyner and Trent Brown.
The Bucs might still believe in 2018 second-rounder Ronald Jones,
just as Washington will likely try to turn things over to Derrius Guice.
There were other teams that might have been willing to cut
their incumbent starter and replace them with Bell, and according to ESPN's
Adam Schefter, one nearly did. The 49ers went after Bell in a move that would
have seen them theoretically cut McKinnon before ever playing a game with the
team. Bell is a better back than the former Vikings backup, and the Niners
would have had the money to make the move, but Kyle Shanahan's offense simply
does not require an expensive running back to succeed, and we have more than
two decades of history as proof.
Other teams that were rumored to be involved didn't make
sense. The Ravens are too smart to pay an enormous premium for a running back.
The Eagles have repeatedly saved money at the halfback position under GM Howie
Roseman in recent years to invest elsewhere. I'm a little surprised that teams
such as the Bills and Texans didn't make a run at Bell to try to replace McCoy
or Lamar Miller, respectively, but by Tuesday afternoon, it felt
like the Jets were mostly negotiating against themselves.
They always made the most sense as the likeliest suitor for
Bell. They had a ton of cap space and a general manager who was desperate to
spend it to keep his job. Mike Maccagnan has a history of paying running backs,
although those signings generally haven't moved the needle. New York needed to
upgrade with Bilal Powell hitting
free agency and Isaiah
Crowell finishing 46th out of 47 backs by Football Outsiders' measure of success
rate.
The Jets' goal this offseason was to build a better
infrastructure around Sam Darnold,
and Bell was the natural final piece. They hired an offensive head coach in
Adam Gase, signed slot receiver Jamison
Crowder, and traded for Raiders guard Kelechi
Osemele. They probably need to add a center after missing out
on Matt Paradis, and tight end is still a question mark, but in
the Jets' efforts to find weapons for Darnold, Bell is a considerable upgrade
on the backs they have.
These moves will take a lot of pressure off Darnold to make
plays downfield. When healthy, Crowder is a valuable slot receiver and a source
of relatively easy yardage. Bell's utility as a receiver is well-known; while
the claims that he amounts to a No. 2 wideout were overblown at the time in 2017, he's certainly one of the
most effective receiving backs in football.
Gase struggled to figure out his running back situation in
Miami, repeatedly stumbling between options. He started his tenure by trying to
sign Anderson to an offer sheet that the Broncos matched. The Dolphins then
signed Foster and built a four-back rotation before turning things over to
Ajayi, who broke out in a massive way. One year later, the Dolphins grew
frustrated with their culture and traded Ajayi to the Eagles to try to fix it.
Ajayi was such a problem there that he won a Super Bowl.
Next, Gase turned the job over to a timeshare between Kenyan Drake and Damien
Williams before eventually giving the full-time gig to Drake,
who carried the ball 91 times for 444 yards over the final five games of the
2017 season. Dolphins fans were excited about the idea of a full season from
Drake as the starter, only for Miami to sign Frank Gore and
give him 156 carries to Drake's 120.
Now, though, the story is set in stone before the opener
even begins. Gase will plug in Bell and worry about the rest of his roster. I
would be worried about possible friction down the line if Bell struggles and
Gase is still coach, but the Jets didn't shell out this sort of money to have
their star sit on the sidelines. He's going to get a heavy workload, with
occasional rest provided from third-year back Elijah
McGuire.
There will naturally be speculation that the Jets did this
for promotional purposes. They might have upped their offer after the
embarrassment of losing Anthony Barr back
to the Vikings because he "felt sick" about joining the Jets. They might
have wanted to win the war in the New York papers against the Giants, although
they couldn't have known that the Giants would cede competitiveness to them by
trading away Odell Beckham Jr. hours before Bell announced his pact.
I don't think those factors ended up mattering all that
much. The Giants ran themselves into the ground without the Jets' help. The
Jets shouldn't spend money on a running back because a would-be edge rusher
didn't end up taking their cash after all. New York can now go into the draft
with a reasonable shot of coming away with Nick Bosa, given that the Cardinals appear to be looking
at Kyler Murray with the No. 1 overall pick, while the 49ers
just signed their Leo rusher by trading for Dee Ford.
Adding Bosa or Josh Allen would
plug the team's biggest remaining hole on defense.
In the end, Bell and the Jets are a marriage of convenience.
Maccagnan needed to add weapons for his young quarterback, but there weren't
exciting-enough wideouts on the market for the Jets to displace Robby
Anderson. A running back will do. Bell unquestionably wanted more
money than this, but in the absence of a massive deal, he'll come away with
merely life-changing money. Amid a two-day frenzy in which players such
as Billy Turner and Justin
Coleman were coming away with stunningly large deals, Bell's
contract is one of the first in this free-agent period to come in short of
expectations. He will have to defy history to do the same in New York.
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