During a weekly visit with our good friend Todd Wright of Sporting News Radio, the light bulb finally began to flicker.
And, after subjecting Todd’s audience to my stream-of-consciousness attempt to comprehend the decision to cut and re-sign linebackers Tully Banta-Cain and Eric Alexander, I finally figured it out. (I could have spared Todd’s audience the agony by merely reading what Shalise Manza Young of the Providence Journal had to say about the situation.)
Banta-Cain and Alexander previously had been signed to one-year deals for the veteran minimum. By rule, neither player could have been signed for 2010 by the Patriots until the first day of the 2010 league year.
So the Pats cut them on the eve of the trading deadline, after which they would have been required to pass through waivers. And then the Pats re-signed them (or, in Alexander’s case, will re-sign him) to multi-year contracts covering 2010, and possibly beyond.
But this maneuver requires even more advance collusion than the 54-man roster trick, which entails a vested veteran being cut on Saturday and re-signed on Monday. It’s possible, if not likely, that the Patriots negotiated the long-term deals with the players’ agents before cutting them -- and that the players agreed on a wink-nod basis not to sign elsewhere.
While the tactic might not violate the letter of any league rules, the Competition Committee should find a way to close this loophole, either by preventing such players from being re-signed by the team that cut them or by requiring them to pass through waivers.
As to Alexander, the effort of coach Bill Belichick to explain that he hadn’t been cut makes even more sense. Belichick knew he was taking a slight risk that either or both players would decline to honor their handshake commitments to re-sign. So why acknowledge publicly that Alexander was available to a higher bidder?
