It lives! MMQB is alive!

Offseason reason to go from revival to Six Feet Under

Preface: You demanded it. You just had to have it. You couldn't live without it.

Uh, that's what the CNNSI.com marketing side would say about the offseason return of my wee-hours-of-Monday-morning pastime, Monday Morning Quarterback. But that would be a lie. Best as I can tell, not a single one of you called or e-mailed the sports desk in Atlanta and complained about the Quarterback going into its usual football offseason hiatus. So maybe its March regeneration should have a ring of truth to it, like:

You didn't care that much. You really didn't. But my contract was up, I like writing MMQB, the site says it's pretty popular, I wedged making the Quarterback a 48-week-a-year column into negotiations for a new contract, Sports Illustrated and CNNSI.com bought it, and so now we'll all pretend you enthusiastically await its arrival on your computer doorstep every Monday by 10 a.m. EST.

There you have it. The one difference between the fall Quarterback and the winter, spring and summer Quarterback will be in content. I'll write about baseball quite a bit, I would guess, because I like it a lot, and about some other sports when the opportunity arises. (Sounds like a good way for the company to pay for a few baseball trips.) I'll write about the girls softball teams my wife, Ann, and I will coach. First, the town league's first-through-third-grade bunch in our hometown of Montclair, N.J., then the 10-and-under team we'll take to some tournaments in and around New Jersey throughout June and July. Mainly, I'll write about what I want to write about. That's how this little column became one of my favorite things to do. And we'll just see what happens from there.

Which brings us to offseason MMQB number one, live and in color from the lobbies and the bars and the Starbucks inside (Jose) Conseco Fieldhouse in Bricktown, site of the opening of free agency and the annual scouting combine. Interesting weekend. Here goes:

Please Stop All The Free-Agency Whining

INDIANAPOLIS -- On Friday morning, in the meeting rooms of the Westin Hotel here, I saw the most grim-faced group of guys I'd seen in some time covering the billion-dollar industry that is the National Football League. Agents. Scores of them. In town for the annual agents' meeting at the NFL scouting combine, they worked their cell phones trying to drum up business, any business, for their veteran clients on the first day of free agency.

The MMQB List of the Week The Top 10 predictions of the near future in NFLdom:  1. Houston will be tempted by the better mechanics of Joey Harrington but will settle on David Carr as the No. 1 pick in the April 20 draft.  2. St. Louis, put off by Ricky Proehl's negotiations posturing (I want to play for the Rams for the rest of my career; I want to see what's out on the market), will sign a repentent Cris Carter as No. 3 receiver -- but only after breaking bread with Kurt Warner and convincing him Carter's not selfish. The Rams will give Proehl a chance to come back only at the new veteran minimum of $750,000, and if he doesn't take it, St. Louis will sign refugee-of-Spurrier-nation Jacquez Green.  3. Detroit, with the third pick in the draft, will be tempted by a package of picks from Oakland, will eschew Harrington because Matt Millen feels Mike McMahon's his quarterback of the future, and will end up taking the best deal to move down.  4. Patriots ownership will be stunned at the lack of interest for Drew Bledsoe. New England's football brass will not be. I think the best offer for Bledsoe will be a third-round pick, but I can't figure out from which team. Maybe Oakland. Maybe Houston, which really doesn't want Bledsoe because he's not mobile enough, but might not be able to turn down the chance to get an established starter and a good mentor for Carr for a third-rounder.  5. Washington and Baltimore, who have no interest whatsoever in Bledsoe, will settle on cheapies Shane Matthews and Chris Chandler, respectively, as their veteran horses.   6. Tulane quarterback Pat Ramsey will fly up the draft board in March and end up getting picked in the teens of the first round.  7. On defense, Dwight Freeney, the Syracuse sacker, will convince people he's not too small at 6-foot-1 and 266 -- Hugh Douglas wasn't too small -- and end up getting picked between 10 and 15 because he does something every team in the NFL needs desperately. He sacks.  8a. Elvis Grbac won't be signed by anyone and will seriously consider not playing football this year.   8b. Thirty-two NFL teams will seriously consider not signing Grbac.  9. The Jets will draft all defensive players.  10. The Patriots will dump Terry Glenn on a skittish Green Bay and sign Tampa Bay cornerback Brian Kelly in free agency.

And I listened to dozens of excuses why the market was so slow. Among them: Teams aren't usually at the Scouting Combine when free agency starts, so the market surely will pep up when the deal-makers get back to their offices. Too many teams were following New England's low-spending model that resulted in a Super Bowl win, but these teams would get impatient when they found players they really liked. And the whining. Oh, the whining. From agents and, later in the day and weekend, coaches who want the system changed, who want a softer cap so things like the dismantling of the Baltimore Ravens this offseason won't happen anymore. The game's being ruined by teams throwing out so many veterans every year. There's no consistency. It's worse than college football. It's ruining the game. Blah, blah, blah.

Two points:

1. I'll tell you what free agency with a hard cap is. It's great for football. It's why every owner in every sport admires the NFL. Control of costs. Competitive balance, where Green Bay, the nation's 96th television market, plays by the same financial rules as New York, the first market.

2. The rules by which NFL teams play now were collectively bargained with the players. The owners agreed to them. The players agreed to them. If you're the Baltimore Ravens, and in 1999 you pay a good player like Michael McCrary a $12.25-million signing bonus and an end-of-the-line player like Harry Swayne a $5-million signing bonus, you know there's a very good chance that neither will play to the end of the contract at the level you're paying him. So future caps will be loaded with the Swayne mistake and the McCrary overpayment, and the only way out is to take a gigantic hit in one year -- which the Ravens are now doing -- and hope, somehow, you can go .500 this season while stockpiling some cap room for a future run beginning in 2003.

This is an alternative, of course, to the way Jacksonville and Tennessee and Baltimore have done business during the last three or four years, the kind of business that has them in horrible cap holes right now. And that is to just say no. Be smart businessmen. Don't be so weak in negotiations. Don't think you're one guy away. Don't think that of all the players available in free agency there's only one you'd be happy to have at a certain position. I talked to one team this weekend that is learning. This team, the guru of which asked not to be identified, needs a receiver. Number one on its board is Carolina's Donald Hayes. But Hayes wants $3 million a year. This team wants to spend about $1.5 million. This team has clear Nos. 2 through 6 on its list at receiver. Az Hakim of the Rams is next, and then this team will drop the price to just under $1 million in base salary with incentives. Then they'll go after, in order, Germane Crowell (coming off knee surgery), Corey Bradford, Jacquez Green and Joe Jurevicius. "Our theory," Team X guy said, "is that Donald Hayes is clearly the best of that group. But is it worth it to us to pay Hayes $2 million a year more than Jurevicius? No. A few years ago, I'm not sure, but I think we would have rushed out and paid Hayes the money because he was the top guy on our list and teams were bidding aggressively for the top guys on the list."

Ah, the good old days of free agency. It was gold-mining. The next strike could come anywhere, any time, and for a silly sum of riches. In 1993, Reggie White kicked it off with his world tour of teams. I flew with White from Cleveland to Dallas, listening to agent Jimmy Sexton and White's wife debate the pros and cons of all the franchises -- Green Bay, Cleveland, Washington, San Francisco, the Jets -- wanting to make him the richest football player of all time. The next year it was Scott Mitchell, of all people, getting drooled over. Wayne Fontes wanted him so badly in Detroit that I'm sure he would have licked Mitchell's feet to get a deal done. The Rams and Vikings wined and dined him aggressively, too. I remember telling agent Tony Agnone, correctly, that Mitchell was nuts to turn down the progressive Vikings for the frenetically disorganized Lions just because the Lions had a few more dollars on the table. I remember five years ago when a private jet was dispatched by the Seattle Seahawks to an airstrip near Boulder, Colo., in the middle of the first night of free agency. The jet picked up Pittsburgh linebacker Chad Brown and his wife. The jet flew them to Seattle, where they freshened up at a hotel and were whisked immediately to Seahawks headquarters. Just after sunrise, the Seahawks put a ridiculously generous contract on the table -- $7 million to sign, average salaries of $5 million a year, a deal that, believe me, won't be seen in this year's Wal-Mart market -- and told Brown: The offer is off the table if you leave the room without signing it. He signed.

There will be no Chad Browns this year. Or maybe forever.

Last year, New England had a defensive tackle, Chad Eaton, it wanted to keep. Eaton, a free agent, wanted to test the market. He got Seattle to offer a $3.5-milion signing bonus, which is the only guaranteed money players get. He went back to New England. The Patriots cringed and flinched and cursed their luck -- and wished Eaton well in Seattle. Then they went out and signed 26 free agents, 20 of whom lasted the Super Bowl season with them, for less money combined than Seattle paid Eaton. Now that's brilliant cap management. More important, it's brilliant scouting. Bill Belichick and director of player personnel Scott Pioli have a simple philosophy: They're not afraid to go to the sixth guy on their list if the top five are out of their price range. And they won the Super Bowl. "I'm not sure we know what the paradigm is right now," Baltimore head coach Brian Billick told me Saturday night. "We're all still figuring out the best way to handle free agency."

New England has one way. The Patriots might be a freak thing because they had a lot of bit players and not many big stars come through; four of their top five cap-valued players had little impact on their Super Bowl win. But the Patriot Way has lessons for every team. They learned how to say no.

As for starry teams, I don't like how Baltimore did its business. The 2000 Ravens will go down in history as the '97 Marlins unless, as Billick says, they can revive their greatness in 2003 after a cap-strapped season this fall. I like how the star-studded Rams are handling their cap right now. They entered the weekend with three valuable free agents -- Hakim, linebacker London Fletcher and pass-rusher Leonard Little. They decided not to re-sign Fletcher because, even though he was a very good player in the middle of their defense, he wasn't worth more than $4 million a year; they replaced him with a lesser-impact player at the point of attack, but one who could drop in pass-coverage better, Tampa Bay free agent Jamie Duncan, for five years and $12 million. They'll only re-sign Hakim, an electric player who fumbles too much, if no one else pays him well. And they decided they would pay one player, Little, a lightish pass rusher who, when used correctly, can be a consistent 13-sack guy. They paid him $3.5 million a year, on the average. "Teams like New England have had success by showing restraint," said Mike Martz, who credited club president Jay Zygmunt with showing said restraint. "That's how you have to do it today. When we sat down this offseason, we looked at 2003, 2004 and 2005, as well as this year."

The NFL and its players have made rules of the game. The smart teams are adapting to them. The rest? Don't come whining to me.

Ten weeks ago, Brian Billick said these words to me on the phone, sounding like a stockbroker with a can't-miss tip: "Do you want to be the guru this week? Go out there and say there is no way in the world Elvis won't be our quarterback next year."

1. I think the only person Matt Hasselbeck should be mad at is Matt Hasselbeck. He simply didn't play well enough to stave off Trent Dilfer, and Mike Holmgren couldn't say to his veteran team in camp this year that Hasselbeck was the best guy to lead the team on what will be a playoffs-or-bust run in 2002.

2. I think the idea of the NFL inventing a Thursday Night Football opener is brilliant. A stand-alone, huge night of football, with Chris Berman and Tom Jackson in a makeshift studio (just a guess) on the Giants Stadium sidelines, with the big, bad Niners in town, with two months of promotion ESPN-style pushing the rating into the biggest cable football number ever ... I mean, what can be bad about that?

3. I think John Madden on ABC will have not one scintilla of an effect on Monday Night Football ratings. I would be shocked if it matters. And that is not a knock on Madden. It is a statement of fact. After a game or two of being fascinated by seeing Madden in the MNF booth, the novelty will wear off, and the identity of the men who are in it will not lift the ratings by even a tenth of a point. Good games will. I mean, have you ever sat down with a choice of two NFL games to watch and said to yourself: Well, I know the Rams-Niners is a better game than Bears-Vikings, but the Chicago game has Madden and the Rams game has Dierdorf, and so I'm watching Madden? No! You watch the game, not the announcers.

4. I think these are my non-sporting thoughts of the week:

a. You must read Rick Reilly's Life of Reilly column on Sarah Hughes this week. Great read. Great lesson. What a great job her parents did with their six kids.

b. I want to know this about the Grammys: How can an album that 95 percent of the country has never heard of, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, win the biggest award in the music business?

c. And that isn't said because I'm a U2aholic either.

d. Listening to Bob Dylan the other night reminds me of what it would be like if Terry Bradshaw suited up for the Steelers and played opening day. Compelling, but pathetic. It's over, Bobby.

e. But if it isn't, could you please enunciate? America thinks you were singing either in Swahili or in tongues.

f. I'm a big Six Feet Under fan, and one episode doesn't change that, but last night's was one weird show. The old man's in it too much for my taste. And why doesn't the teenage girl see what a first-class loser she's dating?

g. You would have loved the Montclair All-Adult Spelling Bee Sunday evening. I got home in time to be on one of the 47 teams, along with town buddies Charlie Bagli of The New York Times and his colleague John Manners. We lasted six words into our round. The word that KO'd us: "mucilagenous." Meaning sticky, or viscid. We put down "muscilagenous." We didn't walk home with the big trophy, but we did get a bar of soap. I took the hgh road, of course, blaming Charlie and John with wives later, and saying if they'd only listened to me we'd have been out much earlier.

5. I think the early candidate for dumb contract of the year -- and no one's going to compete with this one, believe me -- is San Diego signing third receiver Tim Dwight to a five-year, $16-million deal. For a guy who plays about 40 percent of the snaps (he could morph into a starter this year, but I say he'll have trouble taking the punishment of full-time play), this is an idiotic deal by Chargers GM John Butler.

6. I think Jessie Armstead will be in on about 42 tackles when his new Redskins face his old Giants next fall. He wants 'em bad.

7. I think these are my familial thoughts of the week:

a. You know your daughter is growing up -- the daughter, Laura, who's a freshman at Tufts, in the Boston 'burbs -- when she passes on going to a Bruins game at the FleetCenter because she's too tired, has too much work to do, and says it costs too much money.

b. I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to e-mail their condolences about the death of the King Family golden retriever, Woody, who, you may recall, we put to sleep in mid-January after one heck of a great run. Writing those kind thoughts was really nice of you, and forgive me for not writing back to each of you individually. We're waiting for a nice spring day when we can take his ashes and bury them down in the back of the back yard, right near Ann's garden. He always liked that garden. We suspect he borrowed more than a few tomatoes out of there before we improved the fencing.

c. Montclair High Athletic Note of the Week: The bowling team finished a surprisingly decent 7-8, with soph kegler Mary Beth King sharing high-average honors. Now it's on to softball, with new coach Tricia Sanchelli leading the Mounties back to respectability. We hope.

d. Montclair Sports Illustrated Bears Note of the Week: The new 10-and-under team, to be coached by Peter and Ann King this summer, will take three girls to pitching lessons Monday night to see if we can start to get a hurler ready for the summer season. You'll like our uniforms. I'll put a photo in the column come June.

8. I think if I'm a free agent of pretty good skills -- Az Hakim, La'Roi Glover, James Farrior, Donnie Edwards -- I say yes to the first deal averaging $2.5 million

9. I think Miami should make the deal for Ricky Williams for a one this year and three next year. The question the Dolphins have to ask themselves is this: If you could get the best running back in the draft this year -- and I would say Ricky Williams has more value today than William Green out of Boston College, the early consensus best back in the draft -- wouldn't you pay a late-first and late-third for him? Pony up, coach Wannstedt. I still have not figured out why the Saints want to trade a guy who'll be a 1,400-yard rusher and consistent non-bitcher.

10. I think if Kerry Collins is worth the 8-millionish his agent's asking the Giants for, then Brett Favre should be awarded the Green Bay franchise tomorrow.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King covers the NFL and appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated and CNN's NFL Preview. Click here to send a question or a comment.

 

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