Vikings unlikely to get Moss deal done anytime soon
Just more than two weeks from the start of Minnesota's training camp, contract extension negotiations between the Vikings and star wide receiver Randy Moss are headed nowhere. And there's danger lurking on both sides.
While both parties hold out slim hope for an agreement before the start of the 2001 season, in reality there's virtually no chance a settlement will materialize this month. The Vikings are willing to make Moss the game's highest paid receiver, in the range of $7 million per year over the life of a long-term deal, but not the game's highest paid player, as Moss is requesting.
The threshhold being used in the talks is the $8 million per season level, or at least more than the $7.5 million per year that Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre is scheduled to earn in the first three seasons of his recently re-worked deal. Moss doesn't deserve to be restrained by the receiving pay scale (Buffalo's Eric Moulds is the current pacesetter at about $6 million per) the Vikings concede, but they also are adamant that they will not set the precedent of paying a receiver as much or more than Favre or Drew Bledsoe.
Where does that leave things for Moss and the Vikings this season? In all probability, the relationship is going to get rocky before it gets better. More than one informed observer believes it is inevitable that nothing will get done until the Vikings are staring into the frightening abyss of whether to tag Moss with their franchise player label next March.
The Vikings, of course, must retain their franchise option as their ultimate leverage in the negotiations, but Moss has made it clear from day one that he would view the applying of that tag as a hostile gesture and refuse to play under it in 2002. Always a loose cannon, even in the best of times, Moss would be a walking, talking fourth of July extravaganza if the Vikings were to openly threaten him with the franchise tag.
Neither side wants to publicly damage any slim chance of reaching an agreement before camp, but the truth is, the Vikings have no real impetus at this point for upping their standing offer of about $7 million per year. The club's thinking is, if the Vikings are going to have to come to Moss and give him a deal of that stature anyway, why should they risk doing it a year earlier than necessary? Why not extract from Moss one more relatively inexpensive season of about $3.5 million, which is what he is scheduled to earn thanks to a Pro Bowl escalator clause that will be activated in the fourth and final year of his 1998 rookie deal?
Moss and his agent are well aware of that logic, and understand it. But there is another risk the Vikings will be assuming by following that reasoning. If Minnesota doesn't make what Moss views as a serious attempt to extend him before this season, there are more rumblings that he would report to Mankato, Minn., on July 29th as something less than a happy camper.
The Vikings are unlikely to have Randy Moss' signature on a new deal before the start of the season. Andy LyonsAllsport
No one is suggesting that Moss won't play and produce for Minnesota in the final year of his contract. But some within Moss' camp believe the Vikings are being naive if they think Moss won't publicly spill his frustration with the team's tactics after the first frustrating game of the season. And the second, and the third.
While head coach Dennis Green and the Vikings' brass know it must allow Moss to be Moss, taking the good with the occasional bad, the team can't be eager for two or three more of the emotional, no-holds-barred locker room interviews like the one he granted after Minnesota's ignominious 41-0 NFC title-game loss to the Giants in January.
In Moss's eyes, the Vikings have reaped one of the best bargains of all time in the first three seasons of his four-year, $4.4 million rookie deal, making a killing in ticket sales and merchandising in no small part to his game-breaking skills. To try and squeak out a fourth year under basically the same arrangement, while Moss risks injury, would go a long way toward eroding any sense of loyalty he feels to Green and the Vikings and speak louder than any soothing words the team might offer.
Intent on making sure they appear to be on the right side of the public relations aspect of these negotiations, look for the Vikings to make at least one more strong push to get an extension before camp opens. They resumed contact with Moss' agent, Dante DiTrapano, this week, and still might find a way to massage the structure and the numbers enough to allow both sides to claim victory.
In fairness to the Vikings, they have more than Moss to worry about. They still have quarterback Daunte Culpepper to plan for. Culpepper is entering the third season of his five-year 1999 rookie deal, and almost certainly will request that his contract be torn up and updated next year if he produces this season anywhere near his stunning levels of 2000. The Vikings can't make too strong a case to Moss about the value of franchise quarterbacks without Culpepper using their words against them next year at this time.
Together the pair could wind up accounting for up to 20 percent of the Vikings' 2002 salary cap. Having lived off his status of draft genius in regard to selecting Moss and Culpepper in 1998-99, it is almost time for Green and the Vikings to pay the price for that acumen.<<
I'm thinking the Vikes finish 4th in the NFC Norris division -g- |
