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The Bears signed all their draft picks and gave Brian Urlacher the contract he wanted, but they still weren’t able to open a holdout-free training camp.
Kick returner and wide receiver Devin Hester refused to show up for the opening practice and is staging a holdout because he’s unhappy with his contract, Mike Mulligan of the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.
Hester has two years left on the four-year, $2.86 million rookie contract he signed as the Bears’ second-round pick in 2006. He is scheduled to make $445,000 in 2008 and $530,000 in 2009. The Bears could fine him close to $15,000 for every day of training camp he misses.
The Bears and Hester’s agent, Eugene Parker, have been negotiating an extension, but Parker and Hester apparently don’t think the Bears’ offer is adequate.
It would be tough to determine how much money Hester deserves because there’s never been an NFL player quite like Hester. He’s unquestionably the best return man in football, but he so far hasn’t contributed much as a wide receiver. This year the Bears hoped he could become a more significant part of the offense, but he’s now missing valuable time working with the Bears’ quarterbacks.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Well, its not like he’s gonna fall down the depth chart at wide receiver, they have no depth at wide receiver.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
The reason the bears don’t want to renegotiate, is that as a receiver, Hester is dumber than a stump. They only gave him four offensive pass plays to learn last year, and he couldn’t remember two of them. There’s no way the QB is going to know where he’s going, no matter how fast he is. good return man, but that’s it, a special teams player extraordinaire only.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
“but he’s now missing valuable time working with the Bears’ quarterbacks.”
Not really. I saw him before the Cubs game the other day on the field scooping up grounders at shortstop. He didn’t miss any - he will be fine.
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July 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I can see where Hester comes from on this one, he is clearly the best returner in the game today, and should be paid as such. Returning kicks and punts means you have a short shelf-life so you have to cash in early because you are not going to later on.
I do think there is a lot to be said for the loyal soldier approach of a guy like Marques Colston who was grossly underpaid for his performance (much much more so than Hester ever will be) over the confrontational approach of a holdout, especially for a younger player. With that said however, some times you do need to show them you mean business, and a holdout is all a player can do.
Any regular Joe out there can just quit if he doesn’t get a raise and go work for the competition, a player can’t do that due to the restrictive rules governing sports contracts. You can all be damn sure that if you are the top performer in your company and you get paid worse than most of your coworkers, the boss is going to get the old “raise or quit” ultimatum pretty quickly.
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July 24th, 2008 at 1:52 am
@brh
Nice. You say I have no knowledge of how contracts work, and yet your description of how contracts work contains a vital flaw.
But if I explicitly pointed out what that flaw was, you’d certainly claim that you knew that and didn’t mean what you said quite that way. But I guess I should follow your lead, hang onto semantics, and respond in kind:
Maybe you should learn how NFL contracts work before you try to comment on them.
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July 24th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Isn’t this guy half of the Bears Offense?
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July 24th, 2008 at 9:29 am
He has 13 TD’s in 2 years. That’s okay, but it is about what he is worth. It’s not like he’s an incredible wide out that catches 80 balls a year. He’s a kick returned and a overhyped speed receiver.
He should feel lucky he’s on the Bear’s (consistently good special teams, meaning great blocking allowing him to run). If he was on a team with poor special teams, he’d be a regular who dat.
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