Dropping the ball

Carter should have stayed the course with Rams

A day later, Cris Carter was a real Nowhere Man. The second-leading receiver in NFL history, who 24 hours earlier had visions of the Rams and Browns dancing in his head, was left teamless after a strange day of negotiations that St. Louis officials privately think revealed Carter's true colors.

"What number do you have for Mike Martz?" Carter asked me during a noontime phone conversation on Thursday.

I repeated the number I have for the Rams coach's private line in his office, and Carter said, "Yeah, I tried that number last night. They said he wasn't available."

Carter was set to dial the number again, but it wasn't going to do him any good. At 3 p.m. ET on Thursday Martz told me that he would not take Carter's call and said he was sticking to his original statement: the team would revisit Carter's status after the NFL owners meetings in two weeks. But in effect, the Rams' interest in Carter is almost certainly dead.

It seems that one of the weirder stories in NFL free-agency history is going to end unhappily for Carter, 36, who thinks he has two good years left. He said he wanted to spend those years in St. Louis. Martz said Carter called him "probably about a dozen times" to drum up interest in the Rams signing him. Martz said Carter told him he'd made $18 million over the last three years, but now it was all about winning; that's why he wanted to play for the Rams and the Rams only. Despite some negative voices in the St. Louis front office about the prospect of signing a guy who has often been accused of being a me-first player, Martz told me last weekend he was going to push hard to get Carter signed when the receiver visited St. Louis on Wednesday.

So, I asked Carter, if he was so hot to trot about the Rams, and if Martz was so much on his side, why he did he visit the Browns earlier Wednesday and then try to delay his trip from Cleveland to St. Louis?

Carter said Browns personnel czar Dwight Clark pushed him hard to make a visit. "In 10 years, I want to be like Dwight in an NFL front office," Carter said from his home in Boca Raton, Fla. "So I wanted to meet with him. Plus, they're a team on the rise."

It's believed the Browns would have offered Carter no more than a two-year deal for a total somewhere between $3.5 and $4 million. Carter would have been viewed as the No. 1 receiver in Cleveland, whereas in St. Louis he would have been the No. 3 man behind Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt . So the earning potential, he felt, should have been higher in Cleveland than the $1.5 million average contract he probably would have been given in St. Louis.

But -- and this is what supposedly peeved Martz -- what in the world was Carter doing fooling around with the Browns when the Rams so obviously were interested? What in the world was Carter doing trying to get a decent deal out of the Browns if, as he said, winning was so important to him? Where could you enter 2002 with a better chance to get to the Super Bowl than in St. Louis, which is the early prohibitive favorite to get back to the Big One?

"I really wanted St. Louis," he said. "It was just a matter of checking out a situation with great ownership and a strong front office [in Cleveland]. I even told Mike when he called me last Saturday night that I'd made a couple of prior commitments, to visit Miami and Cleveland. He said that was fine."

Carter was walking a fine line. He still hoped somehow to get the Rams interested again. But he chafed at the impression that he was trying to get the Browns up to first-receiver money before he went to see what the Rams might offer him. "[Martz] said it was a done deal last weekend, and they never had one discussion with me about money," said Carter. "This thing could have been done. I'm disappointed. As long as people have known me, my word is worth something. My reputation is worth something."

As best as I can determine, Martz never said the deal was done. He talked confidently that the deal would get done if Carter made a suitable impression on the Rams' offensive kitchen cabinet -- Bruce, Kurt Warner , Marshall Faulk -- during his visit to St. Louis. But the dinner Martz scheduled would have had to be moved because Carter would have landed in St. Louis at 7 p.m. instead of 4 p.m., and Martz, apparently, felt Carter was being disingenuous about his overwhelming interest in the Rams.

If Carter was so interested in signing with the Rams, he probably should have visited St. Louis first and done whatever it took to get the deal done. By flirting with the Browns, he shot himself in the foot. And unless he can Dale Carnegie the coach he says he wants to play for, he'll have to find a lesser team -- Philadelphia, perhaps -- with which to end his career.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King covers the NFL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Check back for his weekly Monday Morning Quarterback column every -- no kidding -- Monday morning.

 

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