Continued influx of top-level wide receivers worth considering when thinking about paying one
Over the last decade, it became clear that NFL teams were not making the best decision by allocating premium resources to the running back position. This hit close to home for many Dallas Cowboys fans, as the team appeared to be on the verge of a crisis when they let DeMarco Murray depart in free agency in 2015, only to utilize the fourth overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft on Ezekiel Elliott. They doubled down on Elliott with his 2019 deal, revealing which side of the spectrum they chose to reside on. Elliott was obviously released and later re-signed as a result of the extension. Round and round we go.
However, many NFL clubs have adopted this philosophical approach in terms of how they regard the running back position. The bell-cow era is over, and now it’s time for the committee. There are other ways to win a Super Bowl, and the San Francisco 49ers are just a few flaps of the butterfly’s wings away from demonstrating that you must have a top option in order to win a global championship, so we should not base everything just on those results. It is worthwhile to consider and contextualize everything related to roster construction. In the purpose of examining numerous possibilities for multiple things, is it worth adopting this general stance on running backs but applyingit to the wide receiver position?
An argument against paying CeeDee Lamb, if you want to make one
Let’s make it very clear at the beginning here that CeeDee Lamb should have already received a top-of-market extension a year ago, and that even in our current world where Justin Jefferson turned everything upside down, Lamb needs to be around for the foreseeable future. But that is just an opinion.
Since we have time and idle hands it is worth pondering whether or not there is any sort of argument against the idea of giving Lamb what may be the richest wide receiver contract in NFL history (or something close to it). This is where that running back conversation is relevant.
Every year we hear and see more and more how deep the wide receiver position is in a respective draft class. The world of college football and the offensive coaching available at the NFL level are set up for all-world athletes that play the wide receiver position to make the jump to the pros and thrive right away. Lamb is just one of many examples.
With this being the (general) case, is it worth not paying Lamb and just returning back to the well in hopes of finding another one of him, just one on a four- or five-year rookie contract instead of one of the wealthiest that we have ever seen? To be clear we are entering “it could even be a boat” territory but the prices involved are relevant information, too.
Read more on sportchannel.co.uk
Leave a Reply