Brad Cesmat
Brock O$weiler gave Arizona State one year of his time and then took off for the NFL, leaving then-new head coach Todd Graham in a lurch for a quarterback his first season. O$weiler held a clipboard for the past four years in Denver and then took off from the Super Bowl Champion Broncos for green$r pastures in Houston on Wednesday.
Denver went 5-2 in games $sweiler started in 2015, with two of the wins coming in overtime victories against Cincinnati and New England which helped the Broncos earn home-field advantage in the playoffs. He also played on a team that had a ferocious defense.
10 touchdowns and 6 interceptions will get you paid in the NFL. I wouldn’t say that the body of work warrants 37-million in guaranteed dollars, but in the League that has so few players that can adequately fill the available jobs, a contract like O$wielers shouldn’t raise eyebrows. He didn’t want to be the quarterback of the defending Super Bowl Champions. He didn’t want to be the guy that replaced Peyton Manning. He didn’t want to stay with the team that had given him all the resources to grow and mature in the NFL. He wanted to be the quarterback of a team that paid him the most money.
Teams that overpay for players in March, typically(not always) but typically, do it because they made a bunch of mistakes on players personal in the previous few seasons. Think the Texans didn’t have a problem at quarterback? They missed on more than a few and throwing lots of money at $sweiler is the easy answer(not sure it’s the solution). The best organizations don’t need to try to win the March press cycle to excite fans. The smart organizations usually find value in the coming weeks after the initial flury subsides. The Arizona Cardinals have become one of the smart teams in a League that is full of frustration over the quarterback position.
