In 2010, former Rams General Manager Billy Devaney traded away Alex Barron, an offensive tackle who had been a first-round draft pick of the previous regime. Devaney didn’t think much of Barron at the time, and he doesn’t think much of him now.
Discussing Barron today on ESPN, Devaney said that Barron doesn’t care about football and only plays because he wants to get paid.
“He’s got the skill to play. He does not have the heart to play football. He does not like anything about the game except getting paid,” Devaney said of Barron, who is currently the starting left tackle for the Raiders.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with doing a job just for the money -- a whole lot of people reading this are doing so at a job they go to only for the money -- but when NFL teams are evaluating players, they usually want players who love football, under the reasonable assumption that a player who loves the game is going to work harder at it than a player who’s just doing it to get paid.
Barron has more than $10 million in his NFL career. So if he’s only playing for the money, at least he made a lot of it.
