Alex Mack is young, gifted and ... available? With cash-rich teams ready to spend when free agency begins today, the Browns could be at risk of losing their transition-tagged leader with no compensation. Plus, readers send in their mailSuppose, at the dawn of free agency today at 4 p.m. ET, you could buy a 28-year-old player, injury-free and a solid leader. All analysts would say this guy is a top-five player at his position, with seven or eight prime seasons ahead. Suppose he wanted to leave his current team and would structure a contract to make that happen. Suppose he’d been in the NFL for 80 games and started every one of them. And suppose you could do a deal with this player for, say, about 8 percent of your salary cap over the next four or five years.
And suppose the average NFL team, as of this morning, has $21.3 million to spend under the salary cap.
It would be tempting.
That is the case of center Alex Mack.
The Browns took a chance with Mack in the days before free agency dawned, placing the little-used transition tag on him rather than the costlier (by $1 million) franchise tag. Cleveland would get first-round draft-choice compensation if Mack had been franchised and jumped to a new team. But with the transition tag, the rules are different. The Browns committed to paying Mack $10 million in 2014, the average of the 10 highest-paid offensive linemen; if another team makes Mack a contract offer, Cleveland would have five days to match. If the Browns match, they would retain Mack. If they didn’t match, they’d lose him, and would get nothing in compensation from the signing team.
Late Monday, Mack’s agent, Marvin Demoff, told me he thinks he could write a deal that would be tough for the Browns to match. He also said he has not spoken with any teams about Mack, in compliance with the rules that say players who get transition-tagged cannot speak to any interested teams until the free-agent signing period opens.
“I’m confident we can come up with a structure that would have a reasonable likelihood to not be matched by the Browns—and would be in full compliance with the Collective Bargaining Agreement,’’ Demoff said by phone from his Los Angeles office.
(Fairness in journalism here: Demoff is also my agent. Each time I write about a client of his, I make sure you know of the potential conflict of interest, so you can make your own decision whether to believe I am writing the story fairly or not. In this case, you might believe I am writing this column strictly to help Demoff drum up business for Mack. But I feel writing about it shines a light on a player who might be, other than Jimmy Graham, the best player at his position on the market this season, and in a free-agency season in which teams have more money under the cap collectively than they have in years, I believe a column about Mack is valid.)
How will Demoff structure such an offer sheet? That’s publicly unknown right now, but clearly it has to be a structure that lives within in the rules of the CBA—and doesn’t contain a so-called fluky “poison pill’’ clause that some teams have tried to insert in contracts for tagged free-agent players in the past. The poison pill happened in 2006, when transition-tagged Seattle guard Steve Hutchinson was signed to a seven-year, $49-million deal with Minnesota, and the Vikings put in a clause saying the pact would be totally guaranteed if Hutchinson was not the highest-paid offensive lineman on his team. At the time, Walter Jones was the highest-paid Seahawks offensive lineman, so Seattle couldn’t match. The ’Hawks filed a grievance and lost Hutchinson to Minnesota. That deal led the league to forbid clauses specifically designed for the original team to be unable to match.
So if Demoff has an idea up his sleeve, one he is currently unwilling to publicize to other teams till today at 4 p.m., it’s likely he’s researched it and found it passes NFL muster. Any such offer would have to be painful or overly restrictive to Cleveland, a team that has enough money to match any deal and clearly has a ton of respect for Mack—but also a team that has had multiple chances to re-sign Mack and hasn’t gotten it done.
The most likely team to pursue Mack is cash-rich Jacksonville, with a center (Brad Meester) who just retired and a gaping hole there. But I don’t believe the Jags would want to pay a center gigantic money.
We’ll see if another team steps up. If I had to guess, I’d guess no team would step up to give Mack an offer sheet. But if one does, it will be one of the great stories of a wealthy free-agency season.
Psych!
