https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/03/20/leveon-bell-steelers-jets-free-agency-contract
"Running back
Le'Veon Bell won his freedom from the Steelers by taking a stand and sitting out a full season. Now that he’s a member of the Jets, Bell reflected on the mindset of the team that made him a second-round pick in the 2013 draft.
“Pittsburgh is a great organization,” Bell told Jenny Vrentas of SI.com. “They’ve got a great owner, head coach. They kind of treat you like —
they don’t treat you like you’re human. What I mean by that is like, yeah, I’m an NFL athlete, but still I’m a human being. You know what I’m saying? I still play video games, I still make music. They don’t want to allow you to be yourself. They want you to be, if you’re a Steelers, you’re literally playing football 24/7. You’re not supposed to be playing video games and like making music, playing basketball. You’re not supposed to be doing that. You’re supposed to be working out.”
You’re also supposed to be doing what the Steelers want as it relates to the structure of contracts. Which is what created the problem in the first place. If the Steelers had simply offered Bell the full amount of the franchise tag for 2017 ($12.1 million) and the full amount of the franchise tag for 2018 ($14.54 million), fully guaranteed, Bell quite possibly would have (and arguably should have) accepted a four- or five-year deal starting with $26.64 million over the first two years.
Instead, Bell made the $12.1 million, sat out a year, and got the $26.64 (plus .36) million fully guaranteed from the Jets. While the process was rocky and some remain determined to declare Bell a loser (presumably so that they can say they were right about their position that he shouldn’t sit out the year), the Steelers flicked the first domino by virtue of their stubborn refusal to deviate from the way they structure contracts, even when the player carries the franchise tag.
For more on this and other subjects, check out Wednesday’s PFTOT, appearing in the video attached to this
blurb.[/QUOTE]
Le’Veon Bell Is All-In on Himself (and the Jets)
One of the NFL’s most versatile and productive offensive weapons is now a Jet, and he’s ready to explain what went wrong in Pittsburgh, why he sat out all of 2018—and why it was all worth it. Hey, life’s a gamble.
By
Jenny Vrentas
March 19, 2019
The Big Interview on SI TV, including Baker Mayfield, Terrell Owens, the Eagles O-line,
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The clock has just passed 2 a.m., and suddenly Le’Veon Bell is standing atop a banquette at the front of the Rockwell, in South Beach. The 27-year-old running back’s arrival at the nightclub has triggered an announcement by the DJ, and soon a parade of cocktail waitresses is marching over to deliver bottles of premium liquor affixed with glimmering sparklers and a light-up sign bearing the logo of the football star’s
new rap album,
Life’s a Gamble.
The club—the type of place that doesn’t even open its doors until 11:30 on Saturday nights—has billed this evening as a) an exclusive album-release party for Bell and b) a birthday celebration for a bleached-hair, Viking-bearded millennial-influencer who goes by Mr. Miami. Any notions about this being an intimate event, though, are immediately betrayed by the hordes of spring breakers from Texas and Wisconsin looking to blow off steam.
It’s been a while since Bell has performed in front of a crowd, but finally, around 3 a.m.—wearing a white graphic T-shirt, double gold chains, mirrored aviators and a Louboutin backpack and shoes—he grabs a microphone and unleashes “Free at Last,” a track he wrote about his very public and protracted contract dispute with the Steelers,
which had finally come to an end days earlier.
Money is making me rude
I see that I’m in the news
And they not signing me back, but
They got to pay for it too
Bell recorded this particular song at his home, just up A1A in Aventura, during the first football season he missed in 23 years. (Or the first
entire season, at least; he was suspended two games in 2015, for a marijuana-related arrest, and then three games in ’16, for missing drug tests, both violations of the NFL’s substance abuse policy.) Over his first five years in the pros Bell distinguished himself as one of the best players at his position. In ’17 he touched the ball a whopping 406 times (including 85 catches) for 1,946 all-purpose yards. And then, last season, he didn’t play. At all. In July he turned down a long-term contract offer with Pittsburgh, and he ultimately decided not to take on the injury risk or added wear-and-tear of playing a second straight season on a one-year franchise tag.
Bell admits that when the Nov. 13 deadline to sign that $14.5 million franchise tender and report to Steelers headquarters came and went, he stopped working out for about a month. Instead he retreated to his home recording studio, fueling his music career with the fear/thrill/charge of the gamble he was taking on his football career. Finally, on March 14—some 420 days after he last pulled on his black and gold number 26—he re-emerged with a new rap album and a new four-year, $52.5 million contract with the Jets, including $25 million in fully guaranteed money, a record for the position.
There’s been plenty of
second-guessing of Bell’s strategy, but as he pulls the microphone close to his mouth at Rockwell and spits out lyrics of self-defense—
You want to do what I do/I don’t think you got a clue—what Bell can say for the first time in a long while is that he has no doubts about his next step.
SIMON BRUTY
Fourteen hours after his cameo at Rockwell, Bell is stuck in traffic on his way to a photo shoot in Miami’s Art District. His mother, Lisa, calls to check on his whereabouts, even if the past year has given her plenty of practice in waiting patiently. “I just want to see him play again,” she says. Last year Lisa bought front-row seats to each of the Steelers’ first three games, even though she knew her son wouldn’t be playing. She wore a camouflage team ball cap but realized she wasn’t quite as incognito as she’d believed when receiver Antonio Brown spotted her in the front row, Week 3 in Tampa Bay, and waved.
Bell has played football since he was four; by high school, Lisa’s most effective disciplinary maneuver for her son was threatening to not let him play in that week’s game. As Le’Veon sat out last season, he ribbed his mom about that old tactic, pointing out how much they both missed the game.
To scratch his football itch Bell played endless hours of
Madden and called Lisa when the Steelers were on TV, analyzing Pittsburgh’s game plan and displaying Tony Romo–like predictive powers. He texted James Conner,
his backfield replacement, congratulating him on big plays—but he also fixated on how much work Conner was receiving on the goal line, more than he’d gotten himself.
Back in the summer of 2017, the first time the Steelers offered Bell a long-term deal, reportedly five years at $12 million per, Lisa wanted her son to take it. So did Bell’s agent, Adisa Bakari. “Everyone thought I was tripping,” Bell says of his declining and choosing to play that season on the one-year, $12.1 million franchise tag.
From Bell’s perspective, though, he’d earned more than what was being offered. “They took every ounce from me until I couldn't go no more,” he says. “When it was time to get paid, it was like, Y’all knew what [I’d been through].” Meaning: He’d just gutted through the 2016 playoffs with a painful groin injury that at one point left him unable to sit up in bed. He’d played an entire divisional-round game against the Chiefs, despite telling teammates at halftime that he was unsure if he could finish, and then he received a Toradol injection before the AFC Championship Game against the Patriots. The first time he was tackled in that game at New England in January 2017 he felt like his left leg was about to rip off; when he went back in, he couldn’t hit a hole even if it opened up. His day, and eventually the team’s season, was over. “I feel like that was our Super Bowl year,” Bell says. “I just ended up getting hurt.”
At the same time, the market for running backs was sagging. Devonta Freeman’s extension with the Falcons, signed in August 2017, averaged just $8.25 million per year. As player salaries rose across the NFL, the franchise-tag number for backs—calculated as an average of the top five salaries at the position that year—actually
dropped. Citing his value in the passing game (and the fact that he was Pittsburgh’s No. 2 receiver behind Brown), Bell tried to counter this trend, asking for $15 million per year from the Steelers.
Instead, he played the 2017 season on the one-year franchise tag. Then, he says, the day after a playoff loss to the Jaguars in January ’18, Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert and coach Mike Tomlin pulled him into an office alone. The team would tag him for a second consecutive season, this time at $14.5 million, but Bell says they told him that day they’d get a long-term deal done. When the Steelers eventually made an opening bid well below what Bell was looking for, he told Bakari to counter by asking for $17 million per season. In the end, Bell hoped, they’d end up at his $15 million benchmark.
Pittsburgh’s final offer, Bell says, fell short: five years, $70 million—$14 million per, with the only fully guaranteed money being a $10 million signing bonus. (The Steelers have a policy of not offering future guarantees in veteran deals.) But it was structured to pay out $33 million over the first two seasons, and Pittsburgh has never cut a player one year into a contract that lucrative.
“I was
so close,” Bell admits now. “Like, I almost [signed] it.”
Many NFL pundits believe Bell should have taken that deal, as it offered more money through both two and three years than his new Jets contract does. But Bell, who watched teammate Ryan Shazier’s career potentially end on a single play, cared foremost about the guaranteed money. Plus, the decision, he says, wasn’t just about money.
SIMON BRUTY
Back in 2013, when Pittsburgh drafted Bell, he was ecstatic: His mom raised him outside Columbus, Ohio, but she’d come from a family of Steelers supporters, and she already had a team flag hanging by her front door. Flash forward five years, to when Bell turned down last summer’s extension offer, and he was starting to think:
It’s time for a fresh start."
