Back in early March, various members of the media (us included) got caught up in the notion that Antrel Rolle of the Giants had become the highest-paid safety in NFL history.
The only problem? He quite possibly isn’t.
So while we learned a valuable lesson via that exercise, there’s still a tendency by some in the media to trumpet a new contract as the biggest one ever paid at a given position. The latest example? New Dolphins receiver Brandon Marshall.
His four-year, $47.5 million extension carries a record average of nearly $12 million per year, but only as to the new years. Marshall signed on Tuesday a one-year, $2.5 million contract. So the full value of the contract is five years, $50 million.
That’s a $10 million average. And that’s the same average receiver Larry Fitzgerald generated more than two years ago on a four-year, $40 million deal.
Then there’s the notion that Marshall received $24 million in guaranteed money. But Fitzgerald got $32.1 million.
Breaking it down by year, Marshall gets $4.8 million per year in guaranteed cash. Fitzgerald gets more than $8 million.
So Fitzgerald’s deal remains superior -- especially since the 26-year-old Fitzgerald will be in line for a new contract after the 2011 season, when the 26-year-old Marshall is completing only the second year of his five-year commitment.
We realize that expressing contemporaneous skepticism regarding information spoon fed by an agent isn’t the best way to ensure that the agent will continue to spoon-feed information, but it’s definitely the best way to serve the folks who are reading this stuff and relying on it to be accurate.