Sheldon Brown Will Show Up

Though unhappy with his contract, Eagles cornerback Sheldon Brown is smart enough to know that staying away from mandatory offseason activities wouldn’t be the best way to articulate his concerns. And so, as Bob Brookover of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Brown will be attending a mandatory minicamp that launches later this week. “Yeah, I’ll be there,” Brown said. Of course he will. If he isn’t, he’ll owe the team something in the range of $15,000 per day. And he’ll have to pay back 25 percent of his signing bonus allocation for 2009. There’s also a chance that he’ll be disruptive moving, given the Plaxico Burress grievance ruling, which insulates a player against bonus recovery if he ultimately is suspended for perceived conduct detrimental to the team. As Brookover points out, Brown gave this warning last week: “They don’t want me in that locker room.” But now Brown is distancing himself from that remark. Sort of. “You can take that in another light,” he told Brookover. “I’m the leader on the football team, and it’s bad for players to see me in a situation where I’m not happy. But I’m not going to blow up the NovaCare Complex. I’m not going to be one of the guys who puts on a show week in and week out when the media comes to my locker.” So what he’s basically saying is that, while he won’t be doing situps in his driveway, he might be doing what he can to directly or indirectly foment dissent in the moments when he has access to his teammates, without the media or anyone else around. And that brings us back to our point about the Eagles and their penchant for signing players to ultra-long-term deals and then telling them to shut up and honor their contracts when the players realize several years later than the base salaries don’t compare favorably to the pay that others are receiving at the same position. As one member of the media pointed out last week, the question isn’t whether the Eagles are legally in the right. (And, frankly, they are.) The question is whether the Eagles have allowed their efforts to win championships to be undermined by the presence of unhappy employees. In 17-plus years of practicing law, I’ve seen businesses where a wide variety of employment laws are routinely fractured or sprained. But the employees are happy -- and thus no one every challenges management. Then there are businesses that dot every “i” and cross each “t.” They don’t violate a single right of any of their employees, and yet a certain segment of the workforce despises the folks who run the place. As I’ve explained to many potential clients over the year, there’s no law against being an asshole. Though we’re not saying that the Eagles are being assholes, it seems like they’ve always got a few players who feel that way. And that’s not good for anybody.