NFL 2015

NFL 2015

With the start of yet another NFL season a scant fortnight away, this year’s 32 teams have pretty much taken on their shape for the regular season with the usual suspects as prominent as ever and some new players standing by the ready to make themselves household names, at least in households than contain avid sports fans. With Deflategate dominating the offseason headlines one might expect the reigning Super Bowl champs from the AFC to skip a beat however it is atop the NFC that we are expecting significant changes in 2015. The Seattle Seahawks look to be victims of their own success, handing out lavish contracts to perhaps not-so-special prominent players from their past two Super Bowl appearances, while the ever so savvy Patriots appear to have trimmed some fat wherever possible to allow room for roster improvements like the past week’s acquisition of Reggie Wayne.

A good example of the two teams opposing philosophes can be found at middle linebacker. Last season Donta Hightower filled in admirably for the again injured Jerod Mayo leaving the Patriots with two proven commodities in the middle of their defence heading into 2015 although Mayo was limited to 12 games total over the past two seasons. Seattle had Bobby Wagner for 11 games in 2014 and is hoping that he will play the entire season in 2015 for the first time since he was a rookie in 2012. Hightower missed a couple of games in 2014 and it turned out that he played hurt throughout the playoffs however he was still well enough to make a game-saving tackle of Marshawn Lynch in February.

This offseason Seattle gave Wagner a new deal that will pay him an average of just shy of $11 million. Mayo also got a new deal however his went the other way, cutting his base salary to $4.5 million with incentives that might bring it up to $6 million. With Hightower slated to take home $1.5 million on top of an apportioned $1 million from his signing bonus, the pair of them come in at average salary of only $6.5 million, salary cap shenanigans aside. The difference, $4.5 million, covers Reggie Wayne’s $2.3 million deal and Scott Chandler’s $2.2 million deal. It is the same kind of logic that has the Seahawks paying Russell Wilson, he of the 5 interceptions in the 2014 playoffs , an average of almost $22 million per year or $8 million more than Tom Brady, which pays for…….you get the picture.