One season, and what a different it made. Joe Flacco won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens, giving him the upper hand in the negotiations with the team, winning him a six year contract worth $120 million which is unlikely to run its full course.

Why? Because in 2016, Flacco will be paid $28.5 million if no one restructures the deal, and unless the NFL drastically raises the salary cap to astronomical numbers, there’s no way the Ravens pay him that much money. Not that Flacco, and the agent that won him this deal, Joe Linta, don’t know that.

Linta and Flacco felt every right “bleeding” the Ravens out of every dollar after a fantastic season and especially playoff for Flacco, who has heard quite a lot of criticism over his five seasons in the NFL, despite making the playoffs each and every time. He didn’t throw a single interception in their four wins in the postseason, which eventually landed him the Super Bowl MVP and the huge contract, that stood for a short while as the most expensive in NFL history.

The team did begin negotiating a contract with Flacco about a year ago, but according to USA Today, an argument over $1 million in the 2018 season was what caused them to be stopped and delayed by about a year. Flacco would have made around $16 million a season on a five-year extension, a lot more manageable and realistic to play through than what the Ravens signed themselves up for, even if he deserves every cent of that money.

I’ve never in my life seen a dumber move. I guess people can say, ‘Well, Joe was dumb, too.’ It could have been dumb, God forbid, if he got hurt. But $1 million to  Steve Bisciotti six years from now? That’s like 100 bucks for you or me today. I’m not apologetic for the fact this is really a three-year deal, there’s no way they can afford $29 million a couple of years from now. I’m not apologetic. They chose to walk away.

The Ravens wouldn’t budge from their stand, and Flacco walked away from that proposed $80 million deal. That persistence and possibly not believing that Flacco might turn them into a Super Bowl winning franchise (didn’t do it on his own, though), might have cost them over $40 million. However, as history has shown us, these contract rarely go all the way through.

Image: Source