Haynesworth's Real Worth

Background: Albert Haynesworth signed a $100 million contract in 2009. He played disappointingly for the disappointing Washington team. He was due $21 million on April 1, 2010. Before this, though, he had expressed concerns about changes in the team and expressed his desire to be traded to a team where he would be more comfortable and hopefully productive. Despite these concerns, though, he cashed the check and promptly heldout from all Redskins activites. When asked to give the money back, he refused. When asked to come in and do something for the millions he was being paid, he refused. Months later Haynesworth ended up in camp, but did drop a few memorable quotes along the way.

My favorite Haynes-words is his comment to the effect that just because he signed a contract doesn't mean that he has to do what the Redskins say to do. This seems weird to me, because I had always interpreted the employer-employee relationship as the employee gets paid and in turn does what the employer says to do. If he doesn't want to do it, he can refuse. But he can't honestly expect to get paid for nothing, right? No, that's exactly what he expects. This is the base of the problem, I think: Al doesn't understand the basics of the employer-employee relationship. But there's a bigger problem: he won't play for $100 million.

I honestly can't believe that Albert won't play for $100 million. To give some persepctive,the only other NFL players to get 9 fgures were quarterbacks. And all those were at least 8-year deals. Al's was 7 years. That means he's making more than Peyton, more than Favre, and more than any other player per year. And he gets paid that much to be fat. He gets paid almost $1,000,000 per week during the season to clog the middle of the line. Usually a person's salary would spread over 52 weeks, but seeing as Al didn't come to training camp, OTA's, or anything else during the offseason, that doesn't seem right. And I'd say it's also not really a stretch that he didn't work hard during the offseason as he failed the conditioning test (which I'm pretty sure Betty White could pass) 7 times when he finally did show up to work. So what did he do during his time off? As far as I can tell, he sat around and was fat. Wish I could get that gig.