Ladell Betts (1 Viewer)

[biggamer3]

Boy did he shine when he started a few years back, guy could have been a top ten back.

Than for no good reason he signed with the Skins for a few more years thus making him useless with a healthy Portis.

The time he is free again he will be to old to play like he could have.

Could really be one of the dumbest decisions i have ever seen

 

[Jimmy James]

Maybe he just has to be in the one place with more Five Guys locations than anywhere else. I don't know.

Maybe he feels it's better to be a backup remembered for being underutilized than to be Lamont Jordan.

 

[Weiner Dog]

Boy did he shine when he started a few years back, guy could have been a top ten back.Than for no good reason he signed with the Skins for a few more years thus making him useless with a healthy Portis.The time he is free again he will be to old to play like he could have.Could really be one of the dumbest decisions i have ever seen

Betts received a $3.5mm signing bonus when he inked his extension at the end of the '06 season. He also nets another $2mm roster bonus this year (in addition to his $700k salary).Not all players are motivated with accolades, stats, etc. Heck, maybe Betts simply has a family and he wanted to permanently make their lives easier by making $6mm+ over the past 18 months...

 

[Sigmund Bloom]

Definitely one of the more surprising contracts I've seen in the last few years. He was hot, the Redskins were seeing how valuable he was, and he was about to enter free agency, and he basically took nice backup money instead of at least testing the market to let it set his price.

Chances are we just saw how strange loyalty looks in this age of professional sports.

 

[T Bell]

It's a combination of things-

1) Betts is not a flashy dude who needs the limelight. He appears to genuinely like the Washington area and has a good relationship with the team, which drafted him during the Spurrier years and has kept him into now the third regime. He has a role that he's comfortable with.

2) The league is saturated with RB talent right now - more than I can ever remember. Almost all teams are two-deep with RB's who could put up 4 ypc and 1000 yards with good enough talent around them. Good-but-not-great former backups who go elsewhere to try to start haven't really done all that well. Are you impressed with how Lamont Jordan's career took off after he left the Jets? Reuben Droughns? Tatum Bell? Mike Anderson? Michael Bennett? Chester Taylor? Chris Brown? Dominic Rhodes? If people are predicting great things for Julius Jones this year, I'm not seeing it. Yes, you get occasional outrageous success stories like Priest Holmes, but typically a "success story" in this scenario is a guy who can put together intermittent starting roles here and there as he moves teams, like you've seen with Thomas Jones or Michael Pittman.

The problem is that you're good-but-not-great, and everyone knows that. Under the right scenario, you're going to get replaced like you saw with Chester Taylor and Adrian Peterson, or Thomas Jones with Cedric Benson. Honestly, as successful as Ryan Grant has been, if that team goes 7-9 and is picking at 1.10 next year, and is staring a playmaking RB prospect in the face with that pick do you really think they're going to avoid drafting that RB because Ryan Grant is just too good to upgrade?

Anyway, I think Betts took a look around and realistically assessed his prospects, and thought it was better to be paid well as a backup RB for a team and in a place that he and his family liked rather than chasing something that he probably couldn't keep for very long even if he caught it to begin with. While there's a time and a place for blind ambition, I admire what I take to be the maturity in his decision above and beyond being thankful for the decision as a Redskins fan.

 

[biggamer3]

I was surprised then and also now, he was going to surely get starter money back than

 

[T Bell]

I was surprised then and also now, he was going to surely get starter money back than

Along the lines of what I posted before, there were only a small handful of teams looking for a starting RB, and that was in advance of a RB draft with Peterson heading it, and a number of FA's out there. Essentially, Betts was more than likely going to end up signing with a team that would have had him competing for a starting job, which meant that he'd have gotten "starters money" initially, but couldn't count much on long term security with the team, and could well have ended up as just another backup or guy in a RBBC. Think Dominic Rhodes a year ago or Julius Jones this year.

 

[ExaltedOne]

Some people don't mind getting paid millions to work out with their buddies and have the best seat in the house during games (right on the bench). At least when he retires he'll be able to walk....