Michael Crabtree's Gamble Failed Miserably

(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for ESPY)

At long last, Michael Crabtree has come to his senses.

After drawn-out negotiations, Crabtree signed a six-year deal on Wednesday that will pay him $32 million before incentives.

We know now for sure: There was never going to be a trade, he was never going to sit out the whole season, and if there ever were any teams offering him $40 million smackers guaranteed, they quickly buttoned up once the 49ers contacted the league and accused the New York Jets of tampering.

The whole thing was one elaborate bluff by Crabtree and his daredevil agent, Eugene Parker.

They hatched a plot with two options in mind: Either Parker would bully San Francisco into paying his client the kind of guaranteed money that someone drafted an hour before and several slots above Crabtree got; or he would force a trade that would send Crabtree to some team that would be willing to pony up the dough, or at the very least put him in a position to put up the kind of numbers that would call for an immediate raise. 

It has been a two month long game of chicken, and to the 49ers' credit, they haven’t blinked.

After a near decade of futility, they’ve finally stood up for themselves and reminded the rest of the league that a generation ago, they weren’t just a club in good standing in league meetings, but rather the gold standard of the NFL, the team all others envied and tried to emulate.

It was always likely that Parker and Crabtree’s plan would fail, and three recent unexpected events made it all but inevitable.

First, Jim Brown and Jerry Rice, two of the gentlemen oft mentioned in “the greatest player of all time” arguments, broke the fraternal rank that bonds all athletes and publicly criticized Crabtree.

In an interview on Sirius XM channel The Power, Brown made an impassioned plea to Crabtree, saying, “You don't realize that your legacy will be based upon how you perform not how much money you made.”

When Jim Brown says, “Mr. Crabtree, get your butt in camp,” it’s a little different than some bus driver ranting on sports talk radio.

Rice was more measured with his remarks, but nevertheless said that he thought Crabtree was making a mistake in holding out.

“You need to be in training camp working out with those guys, sweating with those guys, putting those tough days in,” he said. “This game is so fast and it's such a fine-tuned game now that you just can't skip regular preseason then come into regular season and expect to play well.”

Rice also predicted that there would be animosity toward Crabtree in the 49ers' locker room when he did finally sign.

Even Rodney Harrison, the recently retired Patriots safety who might himself be elected into the Hall of Fame in the near future, called Crabtree, “the biggest idiot I’ve ever seen in the NFL,” on ESPN Radio in Philadelphia, and scolded him for being greedy.

“What makes you entitled to anything?” Harrison said, adding “You haven’t done anything.”

Harrison went on to predict that if Crabtree would follow through with his threat of sitting out the whole season and re-entering the draft in 2010 that he’d be blackballed to the point of being a second or third round pick.

So no, there hasn’t exactly been a stirring show of support by some of the game’s greatest all-time players.

The second monkey-wrench in the works was when the 49ers filed the tampering charge on September 21.

Who cares if the allegations were true? In fact, it would be more brilliant of the Niners if they weren’t. Now, with the accusation a matter of public record, the 31 other teams would look guilty as all hell if they went anywhere near Crabtree or his agent.

I imagine that if Parker called anyone’s front office in the past three weeks, he got a lot of secretaries telling him that the general manager was “in a meeting.”  

Suppose Crabtree did indeed sit out the whole season and was eligible for the draft next year. What are the odds the Jets take him? A million to one?

Other teams with renegade owners and needs at receiver, such as the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins

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