deKARMA IS REAL IN THE NFL.

deKARMA IS REAL IN THE NFL.

GuyWhoLikesSport

You pretty much never get what you deserve in life.

Look at George Clooney.

How many great movies is he in? I would say two: Ocean’s 11 and Michael Clayton.

He’s in a couple of other good movies like Ocean’s 12 and Wolfs, but generally he’s had a mediocre career and I don’t know if he’s particularly talented in general.

But…he’s incredibly handsome and good-looking people fail upwards.

Paul Giamatti is the inverse Clooney. Dramatically less handsome and dramatically more talented.

Giamatti is just recently getting the shine he’s earned over a number of years, while Clooney has been one of the most famous people of my lifetime and has a half a billion dollar net worth.

Pretty bleak start to this column, hey?

But fear not, some positivity is coming, or if not positivity, at least some semblance of justice.

In the NFL in 2024, you get what you deserve.

Three franchises made their beds with linen that is made from various levels of moral culpability and organisational rot, and now they are stuck sleeping in them.

The three franchises that I want to focus on are the Dallas Cowboys, New York Jets, and, course, the Cleveland Browns.

First, the Cowboys.

The Dallas Cowboys are the single most valuable sporting franchise in the world, and have been for as long as I remember.

Forbes estimates their value at $9 billion.

They’re owned by Jerry Jones and the Jones family.

The next most valuable NFL team, the Patriots, are $2 billion less valuable.

Despite their absurd financial position, they run the team like a local restaurant that are trying to stiff their staff out of penalty rates.

They tried to pinch pennies on the Dak Prescott and Ceedee Lamb extensions, before ultimately being forced to sign the players to the contracts they were always going to have to sign them to.

They’re about to do the same with Micah Parsons before they sign him to a market setting extension, just like they did with Ezekiel Elliott in 2019.

They declined to sign Derrick Henry, the NFL’s leading touchdown scorer at the time of writing because they “couldn’t afford” him.

They have let virtually all of their defensive and offensive line depth walk out the building and, in general, their cap sheet is the definition of stars and scrubs.

I know what you’re going to say in response, “the quarterback is expensive, they can’t afford to pay all of the other players”.

Balderdash.

In the NFL, if you are willing to pay serious cash, you can put the team on the credit card up to a point.

You can turn base salaries into various types of bonuses and essentially buy cap space for cash and deal with the cap ramifications in later years, or even structure contracts so the bonuses are already in-built and the base salaries are already low.

How do the Eagles maintain an expensive quarterback, two expensive receivers, two expensive tackles, an expensive running back, an expensive tight end, an expensive corner, and an expensive defensive line.

The owner, Jeffrey Lurie, pays the cash and they plan for the dead money.

When you’re a team that is worth as much as the Cowboys, and when you’re trying to contend, you have to open up the wallet.

Instead, the Cowboys are 14th in cash spending.

The Jones’ crying poor is, well, Uncle Junior said it best.

Combine a talent deficit borne of a cheapskate owner with a coach whose scheme that relies on execution, and you have a recipe for a bad season of your own making.

Next, the Jets.

If you hand the keys to your franchise to a guy like Aaron Rodgers, who has been a prolific asshole throughout his career, just after he almost retired but for some time spent in a darkness retreat.

Then you hire his best friend, Nate Hackett, as offensive co-ordinator, fresh off one of the worst head coaching tenures ever with the Broncos and let Rodgers effectively be co-ordinator and quarterback.

Then Rodgers does his Achilles on the fourth play of his Jets career at age-39, and you don’t divert course at all.

Then you go so far as to fire the defensive coach Rodgers didn’t get along with…

… probably at Rodgers’ behest (Rodgers disagrees that he ordered Saleh’s firing but I am immunised from believing anything Rodgers says, I have done my own research on the matter).

If you make all of those terrible decisions, then you deserve the 24th best offence in the league and a 2-3 record through five games (I am writing this before the Jets play the Bills on MNF).

Finally, the Browns.

It’s not hard to guess where I’m going here, but it is so sweet when karma hits so swiftly.

The Browns signed Deshaun Watson to a 5 year, $230,000,000 deal in 2022, while he was under investigation for 22 separate sexual assault lawsuits.

The deal was notable because of player friendly it was because it is fully guaranteed, which is unprecedented in the NFL.

No market-setting player before or since has got a fully guaranteed contract.

How is it going?

Not well.

The Browns are 1-5 despite being the most expensive roster in the league.

Their fans despise the team and especially the quarterback.

It is a reasonable football-only opinion to have that Deshaun Watson was the single worst week 1 starting quarterback in the NFL.

You pretty much never get what you deserve in life.

Because of the amount of cash that the Browns have already paid to Deshaun Watson, if they were to cut him this offseason, he would count for a little over $172,000,000 against the Browns cap in 2025 and a little over $100,000,000 against their cap the year after.

To put it another way, the Browns would have over $250,000,000 fewer cap dollars available to them over the next two years if Deshaun Watson wasn’t playing for them.

Lehman Brothers is jealous of that level of economic mismanagement.

Obviously, the Browns decision is most morally objectionable, but all three of these teams made themselves beds that are completely unsleepable and they’re all hating the experience of being forced to sleep in them.

The karma bus has careened into all of them.

 

Like what you read from our hard-hitting columnist?

Follow @Guywholikessport on Twitter or check out his FULL BLOG HERE