Michael Crabtree's Gamble Failed Miserably

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, would look suspicious as well.

The deft maneuver took all the other teams out of play for Parker and Crabtree, just as they had been the moment the 49ers drafted him.

Finally, after soiling Crabtree’s good name and scaring off his other suitors, the 49ers dealt the final blow by taking away his worth.

They accomplished that by getting off to a quick 3-1 start, giving themselves a 2.5 game lead in the NFC West and establishing themselves as a team with playoff-caliber talent.

Given that the team finished strongly last season under the leadership of coach Mike Singletary, and with the 2009 schedule out far in advance of the draft, how Parker figured the 49ers would “need” Crabtree to start the season well is mind-boggling.

Three of San Francisco’s first four games were within their awful division, where even last year’s 7-9 Niners team went 4-2, and a yard away from 5-1, truth be told.

With a solid defense and a stud running back in Frank Gore, the 49ers were never going to be terrible enough for there to be mass public pressure on them to cave.

If three of their first four were against Indianapolis, Chicago, and Philadelphia instead of Arizona, Seattle, and St. Louis, things might have been different.

The bottom line is that San Francisco’s 35-0 romp against the Rams was the third strike for Camp Crabtree, and now they’re out of options.

All is not lost for the rookie out of Texas Tech, however.

Even though he has pointlessly gambled away, in all likelihood, any chance to have a productive rookie season, he’s never lost the support of the most important person he’ll have in his young professional life, and that’s not Eugene Parker.

“He’s a great kid,” said Singletary in his most recent press conference. “I got a feel for him during minicamp and I haven’t been wrong too much [about players].”

Now that he's committed to joining the team, Crabtree needs to come in, eat some humble pie, do what he can to earn the respect of the veterans, and contribute however little he can.

If he has any sense at all he’ll spend the rest of his truncated rookie season as the first one in the building and the last one to leave.

It would probably be a good idea to take the whole team out to a nice meal, just as a gesture of goodwill.

Most of all he has to do whatever he can to keep Singletary feeling the same way about him that he professes to feeling now.

He’ll find the coach is far harder to please inside the confines of 4949 Centennial Way.