Making the Case for “Overpaying” Terry McLaurin

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June 16, 2022

by Paul Francis

We are entering the time of year in football when the spotlight tends to drift to what is NOT happening.  True, the players have been participating in minicamps and OTAs, but let’s be honest here.  It means very little that the backup quarterback completed a deep pass to the 5th WR in a drill with no defenders.  What we care about is what is NOT happening.

  • What spots on the roster have NOT been addressed?
  • Who did NOT show up for OTAs?
  • Who is NOT fully participating in the drills?
  • Why is Congress NOT investigating certain riots while only focusing on others?

(OK, calm down everyone.  That last one was a joke…ha ha, right!)

As summer activities begin for the Commanders there is one particular “NOT” that looms large over the organization.  Terry McLaurin continues to posture himself as a holdout of further team activities until an extension gets done, and his absence is becoming a bigger presence in the Commanders-verse.  A fresh round of questions and rumors are emerging.  How long will Terry holdout?  What’s the hold up?  Is Washington going to trade him?  Is Terry going to demand a trade?  Is this heading for an acrimonious tag-holdout situation?

Ron River addressed this briefly after practice on June 15 (via John Keim):

Rivera on McLaurin talks: “We’ve been talking with his folks the last week & working on stuff and hopefully taken care of in a matter of time. How much time? Don’t know. It’s never been contentious… Feeling good and confident that at some time this will get done.”

Well, it’s nice to hear Ron say something on the matter to try to qualm our fears.  Now, I’m here to say two things on the matter:

First, I’m going to pat myself on the back for waiting to buy a McLaurin jersey.  I told myself, my son and all those willing to listen that I was going to wait for an extension to get signed before investing in a Washington Commanders no. 17.  I’ve been around for long enough to know that you NEVER invest money in a Washington player’s jersey when they are on a rookie contract.  This situation shows why.

Second, I’m going to make the case for overpaying Terry McLaurin.  Here goes:

  • The credibility of the Washington Commander’s entire front-office is on the line.

Now you may be laughing a little bit at the notion that the Washington Commanders have any credibility to risk, but they do.  When Washington completely rebooted itself by overhauling the FO, changing the name, sort-of-suspending the owner, and eliminating the cheerleaders, a clear signal was being sent.  Washington football was undergoing a major house-cleaning top-to-bottom in all the ways it possibly could, short of being sold to new owners and moved to a new city.

Along with that housecleaning came the sense that business would be done differently around Washington.  The team would strive to operate the way actual good football teams operate, as opposed to continuing the Mickey Mouse circus show we’d grown accustomed to.  A big part of that has to do with building the team around homegrown “draft-n-develop” players.  Washington was able to notch one of those by getting Jonathan Allen on a second contract.  But then Washington whiffed with Brandon Scherff.  Now, with Terry McLaurin up, Washington is at a critical moment.

If Washington signs Terry McLaurin, then we can begin to believe that Washington truly has turned the page. We can tell ourselves that Scherff was an aberration who pulled a “Kirk” and never really wanted to be here.  But if we miss on Terry McLaurin, then there is every reason for the fanbase to believe that Jonathan Allen was the exception, and that this Commander’s operation is just as incompetent as anything we saw under Vinny or Bruce Allen.

This organization is too early into the Commanders reboot to risk that kind of setback.  I’ve already written an article showing how Terry McLaurin can uniquely bring fresh interest and excitement for a next-generation fanbase.  We’re also talking about a player who Washington has already been using as a face-of-the-franchise icon.  They have him appearing prominently in ads and the new uniform reveal.  I mean, if you can’t bring yourself to sweeten the deal to seal it, then I don’t know what to say.

  • He’s earned a little bump.

Terry McLaurin is not only a consummate professional on the field, he’s also a squeaky-clean upstanding citizen, the likes of which you’d be happy to give a spare key to the house and betroth to your daughter.  He has both the potential be a perennial Pro Bowler-type, and the chops to be the guy you want out on TV and in the community repping your organization.  The fans already love him; his teammates already respect him.  Guys like that don’t just grow on trees.  You don’t just presume you’ll find another one in the next draft or free agency because his value transcends the X’s and O’s.

Not to mention that McLaurin has wildly outperformed his rookie contract.  If you want to go back and re-read the breakdown I offered of his production and prospects in a previous article to refresh your perspective, please do.  As I noted in that article, in 2021 McLaurin was only the fifth highest paid receiver on the roster, making LESS in base salary than Curtis Samuel, Cam Sims, Adam Humphries, and DeAndre Carter.  I’m sorry but that is just not right.

In a negotiation like this, a quality deal is not only one that reflects what the team thinks the player can do for the organization in the future. It should also reflect the value of what the player already has done for you in the past, and what he means to you in the present.  Washington has overpaid for other team’s aging stars plenty of times.  They can afford to overpay for one of its own, who has been grossly underpaid based on performance-value.

  • The Commanders need to accept the “Loser Tax”

The “loser tax” is a financial burden that perennially losing organizations shoulder if they want to sign good players.  It works like this – all things being equal, a good player would rather sign for a non-loser than a loser.  So the way that the losers stay in the competitive mix to sign good players is by paying more.

Prime recent examples of this include the Jacksonville Jaguars overpaying for all of their mostly mediocre free agents this offseason, as well as the Cleveland Browns grossly overpaying both in guaranteed cash and moral-capital to “win” the Deshaun Watson sweepstakes.  Those two organizations were willing to embrace the reality of the loser tax.  Ron, Martin, Marty…wake up guys.  We are losers.  We pay the tax just like the other losers.  Deal with it.

  • How Much Would Washington “Really” Be Overpaying?

Much has been made of the way that the wide receiver market has exploded this offseason with eye-popping numbers like “5-year /141 million dollars” and the like.  This has been cited as one of the potential reasons for reticence on the part of the Commanders and the supposed distance between the 2 negotiating camps.  The reality is that most big NFL contracts are stuffed with imaginary funny-money that the players will never see.  You’ve got to dig into the details and do some extra work to account for guaranteed versus non-guaranteed money, voidable years and structures that give the team an “out” before the contract actually runs.

Credit goes to the guys over at HogsHaven for doing some of that accounting dirty work and producing the following breakdown for wide receiver contracts this offseason.  The following numbers reflect what the player is “actually” likely going to make on their contract once you cut out the funny-money.

If we want to rank the actual contract values of the WRs above, it would go something like this:

  1. Cooper Kupp – $27M/yr
  2. Stefon Diggs / Tyreek Hill – $24M/yr
  3. A.J. Brown – $23M/yr
  4. Davante Adams – $22.5M/yr
  5. Christian Kirk – $18M/yr

In fairness to Washington, I don’t know what Terry’s camp is asking for.  Maybe it’s an astronomical number that blows these figures out, and it’s right to pump the brakes and say “wait a minute”.  But would it really kill the salary cap to give McLaurin the same as AJ Brown?  Or even bumping it up to $24mill/year in real money, and say “hey, we’re happy to put you with Diggs and Hill”?

Now you’d be hard-pressed to make an argument that Terry McLaurin, as good as he is, belongs “up there” in a category with Stefon Diggs and Tyreek Hill based on performance alone.  But I don’t think you’d be that hard-pressed to justify it based on the added value of what he means to Washington and its future.  I don’t think it would set a bad precedent; I think it would set the right one.  And if other players complain or want to be equally overpaid, the response is simple “Terry is special.  And if you want money like that, then be special too”.

In conclusion, Terry needs to be in camp and be around his teammates.  He needs to catch passes from Wentz and start building that chemistry.  He needs to show the other young bucks in the WR room how it gets done.  And the front office needs to git’er done.  And as a Washington fan, I’ll close with this thought: If I can spend years of my hard-earned cash overpaying for tickets, parking, Sysco brand chicken-fingers and expired beer at busted Fed Ex Field; then this organization can DEFINITELY overpay to get Terry McLaurin on a contract extension.  That is all.