Ben Volin Inadvertently Starts a Twitter Beef Between Richard Sherman and Joe Thomas
God knows this isn’t the place you come to for Ben Volin praise. His list of grievances against the team I, Dave and Feits care about is long and distinguished. But credit where it’s due, he has a pretty good in depth look at Richard Sherman negotiating his own contract with the 49ers. It’s fairly involved but he basically paints a picture of Sherman naively going into talks with John Lynch and making it clear he not only wanted to be a Niner, but that he didn’t know what he was doing. How within hours of being released by Seattle he was having dinner with Kyle Shanahan. That he’d studied contract language for a total of 12 hours. That he wanted to face the Seahawks twice a year. The fact he brought his girlfriend with him, sort of making it obvious he intended to sign that day. Taking an incentive laden deal filled with hard-to-hit marks like playing 90 percent of the snaps and that keeps Sherman under San Fran’s control if he has a good year. Reading it, you get the impression it was all Lynch could do to not step out of the room, laugh his ass off, regain his composure, then go back in and say “I just talked to the floor manager and he’s furious at me because you’re taking us to the cleaners, but the car is yours. …”
Where this gets really good though is the reaction around the league. Specifically, the reaction by Joe Thomas, who is not happy one of the highest profile players in the 2010s just cut his own financial balls off:
And Sherman wasn’t happy about having his judgment called into question:
Which got Thomas clapping back:
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I love it. Maybe not as much as I always like a good girl fight outside a nightclub, but you have to appreciate two perennial All Pros publicly going at it over something a sportswriter-troll writes. And the beauty of it is, they both have valid points. Absolutely Sherman let his ego get in the way of business. He’s a guy who wants to be known for going to Stanford just as much as he wants to be known as a lockdown corner who aggressively shouts at lady reporters for no reason. And John Lynch clearly Jiu-Jitsued him by using that ego against him, stroked him about how smart and savvy a negotiator he is and picked his pocket.
On the other hand, Sherman is right that he got what he wanted. Not what he could’ve gotten necessarily if he’d played hardball or been willing to walk out without a deal, but what he wanted. Which doesn’t make him wrong. To use that car buyer metaphor again, I have a buddy who sells cars and says the philosophy is that as long as the customer walks away happy, you gave them a good deal. Even if you gave them a horrendously shitty deal.
On the other, other hand, what Richard Sherman does is none of Joe Thomas’s business. On the other, other, other hand, they’re in a union together so it’s every NFL player’s business. All I know for sure is the NFLPA is the weakest union in the history of labor and it’s pathetic the way the best players in the game get fleeced by multi-billion enterprises. That, and it’s interesting as hell to hear what players actually think about each other’s contracts and we need to hear more players beefing about this stuff in public. Then everybody wins.