Consequences

I don’t usually blog about sports, but I can’t resist on this one.

Last week Richard Seymour was traded from arguably the best franchise in all of professional sports to, perhaps, the worst.

Neither Richard, nor the team who traded him, the New England Patriots wanted this to happen. I’m going to speculate that the team went out of its way to get a long term deal signed with the player before the season started, and that the deal they were offering was lower in terms of pure dollars than Richard and his agent believed that they could get elsewhere.

There’s one more wrinkle here, just in case you aren’t familiar with the story. Twice before, Richard refused to report to work because he believed he deserved a raise. He did this in spite of the fact that he was under contract to do so. Both times the Patriot’s acquiesced so that Richard would end his holdout.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three times, shame on me.

Rather than going into the final year of the contract, and letting Richard walk away at the end of year with no compensation, the Patriot’s opted to trade Richard for a first round draft pick. He was quoted as saying he was “Blindsided” by the trade.

Really?

There are more things to consider when you enter into a salary negotiation than salary. One thing to keep in mind is where the job is located. The other is the team, or company, that you’re going to work for. You also should consider your friendships and relationships with your present team mates or co-workers. All of these things have value, and are worth trading for a lower salary, especially in the NFL. Richard Seymour is already going to the Hall of Fame. He’s already made gobs of money. He could have made a deal that factored the benefits of staying put, and would have been at home with his wife and kids celebrating a victory last night instead of sleeping in a hotel room 3,000 miles away from them after enduring what will in all likelihood be the first of many losses this season.

As far as respect goes, the Patriots have Richard Seymour statues all over their newly built hall of Fame. They have also paid the man millions and millions of dollars. No one in their right mind can question their respect for Richard Seymour. If they had chosen out of fear or sentimentality to overpay for his services, there would have been consequences to the team that were unacceptable to the organization.

There are consequences to the decisions we make. In economics, these are sometimes referred to as opportunity costs, or unintended consequences. The opportunity cost of being the highest paid athlete at your position might be that you get to make that claim on a losing team.

If you don’t want to honor your contract, and you want to be the highest paid person at your position, that’s your prerogative. You just might find yourself blindsided into being traded to the worst team in Football a week before school starts.