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What’s next for the Patriots and Logan Mankins?

 02.14.11 at 6:18 pm ET
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Logan Mankins (AP)

The decision to place the franchise tag on Logan Mankins is the least surprising Patriots story of the year.

The Pro Bowl guard, who was designated as New England’s franchise player for 2011, will now receive a one-year guaranteed contract equal to the five highest-paid players at his position. There has been no official announcement as of yet, but according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the franchise offensive line number for 2011 is projected to be $10.1 million.

Oh, but if it were only that simple. First, in this contentious labor climate, the franchise tag as we know it might not even hold up. As we explained here earlier this month, the tag appears to be a sticking point between the players and owners. While the owners consider the franchise tag set in stone, the players association says that if there’s no new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the tag would be meaningless, creating an uncertain future for the Fresno State product.

If the franchise tag does hold up, what’s next? In Seinfeld parlance, in this relationship, the Patriots have hand. Mankins (who was clearly steamed about the prospect of being tagged earlier this year) is under contract for another season in New England, and there’s little he can do about it. The Patriots could also deal him, but there’s not much of a market for a guard who makes $10.1 million a year, even one of Mankins’ ability.

However, one thing that’s important to remember is that the tag given Mankins was reportedly non-exclusive, which gives him the option to try and negotiate a deal with other teams. That would certainly help facilitate a trade. It’s not easy — by rule, the price for franchised player is two first-round picks — but teams do have the option to negotiate, and it’s something New England has done on two other occasions.

In 2003, New England franchised Tebucky Jones, and then dealt him to New Orleans for an impressive haul — a seventh-round pick in that draft and a second- and fourth-round pick in the 2004 draft. It was also the case in 2009 when they franchised quarterback Matt Cassel, hitting him with the non-exclusive tag. That drama ended when Cassel and linebacker Mike Vrabel were dealt to Kansas City for a second-round pick in the 2009 draft that turned out to be Patrick Chung.

Two more options exist in the current system: First, the Patriots and Mankins could use the tag in the same fashion that they used with Vince Wilfork last year. Wilfork was in the same place Mankins is now — upset and angry about the prospect of being franchised. However, both sides negotiated in good faith, and when the tag was exercised, it was used in an attempt to keep the exclusive negotiating window open. (They did the same thing with kicker Adam Vinatieri in 2002 before agreeing to a three-year extension.)

Shortly after that, the defensive lineman agreed to a five-year extension. However, the two sides — at least publicly — didn’t project the same generally positive vibe on Monday that the Patriots and Wilfork displayed last season.

Two, the Patriots could use the franchise tag in the same way they did with cornerback Asante Samuel in 2007. That year, the two sides struck a handshake agreement that the team would not franchise Samuel if he played in 60 percent of the defensive snaps or the team won 12 games. Samuel easily met both requirements, and he signed a big deal with the Eagles in 2008 less than 24 hours after free agency began.

Read More: adam schefter, Asante Samuel, Logan Mankins, Matt Cassel Print  |  Bark It Up!  |  Digg It
  • richard

    IT STARTING TO REALLY SHOW UP .IF I PLAYED FOR THE PATS AND GAVE THE TEAM GREAT STATS,LIKE VINATERI SEYMOUR SAMUELS,VRABAEL ETC YES BILL HAS A MARKET CAP BUT IF I CAME TO THE NEW STADIUM FOR PRACTICE AND SEE NEW STORES BEING BUILT I KNOW THEY WILL NOT GIVE ME A NEW CONTRACT.SO IF I HAD MY CHOICE TO PLAY HERE I WOULD IN THE BACK OF MY MIND THAT WHY BREAK MY BUTT WHEN THEY WOULD GET RID OF ME.

  • Mike

    I wasn’t aware that this type of situation was limited to the Patriots. Haven’t the Steelers and Eagles employed the same business model? Mankins has been offered a generous contract making him among the top 3 paid guards in the league, maybe it was not as much as he would like, but it certainly wasn’t chump change. I think that there is a very high probability Mankins ends up in Chicago with the Bears for their 1st and 4th round picks maybe even a 3rd in 2012. It doesn’t make sense to pay Mankins $10+M as a guard move him and use the money to sign a couple of veteran free agents on defense. Go into this years draft continuing the youth movement with (3) 1′s and (2) in each of rounds 2,3 & 4. Mix in a couple veteran free agants like Crumpler and keep the ball rolling.

  • manchester189

    Seems to me, if I was an NFL owner there absolutely no way I’d give up the Franchise Tag. Look at other sports: Cleveland losing Lebron, and Cardinals may lose Albert. Its part of what makes the NFL what it is. Maybe compromise and give each team say five or six in a ten year period, that would work on both sides.

  • Darrell

    The franchise tag, truly illustrates the NFL is a business predicated on generating a profit. To the head coach, the players are all interchangeable parts except for Tom Brady.
    This season, the Patriots had very little senior leadership on defense and it came to play when the Jets knocked them out of the playoffs. They may stock pile draft picks for the future, but it has created early exits from key games as they continue to refuse to pay their rising stars and ship them off for future drafts. This hurts the team in the short run, but allows for the team to stay young as their oldest defensive player is only 27. Blame the coach for strip mining his clubs players. And no true loyality to anyone but himself!

  • Cherokee Chief

    Reply to Darrell: get a grip, it’s playing TALENT, execution and good, solid coaching that WINS professional football games. It’s not “true loyality (spl) to anyone”. IT’S A BUSINESS and this is exactly WHY the Pats keep on winning; they know when to cut bait and move on in a troubled situation (no pun intended). The “Tag”, it would seem, prevents any one player from gutting or mugging an entire team. So, bye – bye Mr. Mankins, I can’t say I’m sorry to see you go, even though you have talent. But, you and your agent have become a bloody pain in the a$$ and quite frankly, now nothing more than an annoyance to most Patriot fans. I figure you’re worth at least a 3rd rounder? And, BTW “strip mining his clubs players”; give me a break Darrell, this is the ‘richest vein” of young players I’ve seen in Foxboro in a long time.

  • dano_in_nj

    These crybaby players should cry to their negotiators, who approved the franchise tag. Players have broken their contracts’s terms more than owners; you see lots of holdouts, but rarely no-pays (Al Davis notwithstanding). So who has had good or bad faith?* (*ANSWER: the player.)

    Let them both negotiate the franchise tag for the future. For the present, the franchise tag is a bad deal for both because: from the owners standpoint, it overpays for a short-term deal, makes the player less tradable from the owners’s standpoint, and the money straps their cap.

    From the player’s standpoint, he has gotten no long-term security, may be traded to a team, not of his choosing, that is desperate enough for his services to accept the high short-term deal, and then the team is strapped by the money from providing complementary players (see Kansas City with Matt Cassel).

    Better than the tag is to sign the player to any kind of longer-term deal. If you intend to keep him, negotiate the money you need. If you don’t intend to keep him or can’t get the money you need, sign him anyway and trade him. For a guy like this to even be in the discussion, another team will take him at the longer-term league market deal. If you can’t sign him to any kind of league market deal, tag him. But in that case, who has shown the bad faith?* (*ANSWER: the player)

  • dano_in_nj

    The franchise tag is actually a brilliant device for both sides, albeit unintentionally. It was negotiated to be a device that both sides should love because it pins a valuable player and his rights down for the owner while it pays the player handsomely, for the player. In reality, both sides don’t like it, and they shouldn’t, for the reasons above, and it should be used only when negotiation fails, as a gap measure meant to precede a better deal, or if either party is negotiating in bad faith. It is like the Russian Roulette acquisition gambit with a joint venture partner. One partner offers a price to have his/her partner buy him/her out, and if the price is rejected, then the offering partner has to buy HIM/HER out. A similar gambit would be for the player with a certain seniority to propose his deal with the team in $/years. Then if the team rejects it, the player is forced to play only for that deal with another team, along with trade/draft consideration to the original team based on the $/years.

  • moneyball

    Im beginning to think that the Pats (Krafts) are cheapskates. They currently have only two high-salary players on their roster (Brady and Wilfork). They have an abundance of low-salary (young / first contract) players and few of the so-called mid-salary players that they supposedly pay well with the money they save by not going after the top tier free agents. The result is that there is talent gap that even great coaching cannot bridge. Explain to me how teams like the Jets and Steelers can afford top talent at multiple positions and Pats cannot. It’s time to look at the roster with a more critical eye and ask some tough questions.

  • Erik Concord, NH

    To Mike and those other delusional Pats fans taking the Management side of this dispute, consider the following that we know about the Mankins contract issue:

    1. It was the Patriots management that made assurances to Mankins that he would be “taken care of” once his rookie contract expired (and he would have been a free agent under the system in effect when he signed it) after the 2009 season.

    2. The Patriots of course reneged on that course of action. They instead concentrated on signing other veteran free agents like TBC, Vince Wilfork and Brady – they stiffed Mankins in the winter of 2010.

    3. Instead of giving him the deal they promised to do, they stuck him with a low ball 1 year restricted free agent contract of slightly more than $3 million. That contract was less than 50% of his market value. So the Patriots forced the guy to play for a fraction of his value because they could.

    4. To rub some more salt into the wounds, when Mankins agreed to end his hold-out, the Patriots cut the restricted tender in half so that Mankins had to play for a little more than $1 million last year. This was for a guy who should have been paid $7-8 million per year based on his comparable players like Jahri Evans of the Saints, and was a 5 year veteran two-time Pro Bowl player.

    5. The alleged contract extension offer from the Patriots was a big low ball effort on team friendly terms. Has anybody really seen the terms of this thing layed out? All we know is that it was supposed to “average $7 million per year”. Well that does not make it fair nor market value. It could also be backloaded so that Mankins never sees the money if he gets cut after 2 years of the deal. NFL teams make many “salary cap cuts” every year when they have a veteran who they deem is “over paid”, these NFL contracts are not fully guaranteed. He would be a fool to take this sort of one sided deal.

    6. Logan Mankins is not some scrap heap fungible guard from the rookie free agent crew like Dan Connelly, he is one of the top two guards in all of football. He has been named to 3 Pro Bowls in his 5 years in the league – twice being named a starter which puts him in the top two in his conference. This year he was voted 1st team all-pro in the entire league which makes him one of the best two players at his position in the entire league. That is not my opinion it is based on the league wide vote. You have to be a fool not to recognize that this guy is a top player.

    7. Given that Mankins is one of the top 2-4 players at his position, why on earth should he take a team friendly, low-ball, under market deal? It makes no sense. None of you out there would go into to see your boss and ask to have your pay reduced 20% below the going rate “to be loyal”. You would want what is fair and what the market says you should be getting paid. That is all Mankins has ever wanted – to be treated and paid fairly. The Patriots and Kraft have been the villains on this from the beginning. Kraft is the guy who owns a franchise valued at more than $1 billion by Forbes magazine last summer (4th highest franchise value in the US), so he can afford to pay. They are the ones who have jobbed the guy, refused to negotiate in good faith, and have used the system to screw him repeatedly. All Mankins ever does is play top shelf caliber football when he’s on the field. What else could a fan ask for?

    8. The Patriots signed Brady to a very large contract extension in September. Just about every fan would tell you he’s the franchise and if he gets hurt the Patriots are done. Well if that is true, does it make sense to let both of his blind side OL, LT Matt Light and LG Logan Mankins go over money and turn to rookie draft picks to replace them? That sounds like a poor plan to me. Brady probably only has another 2-3 years left at the top before he starts to decline with age. So you want to waste his prime while the Patriots try and break in new young lineman? You really want to risk another season ending injury by having Brady run for his life while a patchwork offensive line tries to learn on the job? For those not paying attention, the Patriots 2010 OL was recently given an award as the best Offensive Line for this past season. So now you want to dump the guys who made it the best to bring in untested rookies? That is completely dumb.

    This issue is such a no-brainer, just pay the man a fair market based contract and be done with it. Given Brady’s age, the Patriots Management should be doing everything in their power to “go for it” the next 2-3 years. Mankins is in the prime of his career (age 28), there is little risk to paying him a good contract for the next 4 years. Maybe you let him go after that contract when conditions are different, now is not the time to do it.

  • Um..

    I love it when guys like Eric go off on us “delsional fans”. And really, it’s getting old calling owners of sports teams “villains”. How about a couple of lines of common sence instead of an unbelievable amount of words saying things everone knows for the most part (not saying you don’t know your stuff, but nobody needs to be preached to that Mankins is a great player) instead of looking at this from a realistic approach.

    1) Gaurds, even great gaurds, are easier to replace than almost any position on the team. Mankins may be the exception here, but that is the reason most team (not just the Pats) don’t go nuts in signing one. The ones that do usually end up having a salary cap issue.

    2) Cmon now..don’t you think every team tells players they will be “taken care of”? The Chargers said the same thing to V. Jackson. The problem is that these 2 guys want top money for maximum years. Teams like the Pats aren’t going to do that for a gaurd. Let’s get real here. I love the guy, but if he were a tackle he would have his kick butt contract right now.

    3) Every player in the NFL knows it’s a business. The “salt in the wound” comment was crap. The Pats know Mankins played the minimum amount of games this year to send a message, and the Pats are doing the same on their end. It’s common place. None of these people “owe” anything to the other. It’s a free market system.

    4) I don’t have a 4th, but you had 8 so I went with it.

  • Erik Concord, NH

    To Um,

    1. Steve Hutchinson signed at the time the highest free agent contract for a guard to move from Seattle to the Vikings a few years ago. So it does happen that top shelf guards will move if they are not paid fairly.

    2. The Patriots did rub salt in the wounds by reducing the contract tender by 50%. Many teams signed their restricted free agents to tenders but did not reduce the contract. It was the hard-ass teams like the Chargers and Patriots that did this. Hardly an endorsement to other free agents considering whether they should sign with he Patriots.

    3. Mankins did not come in and play the “minimum amount of games” in order to get credit for last year. He could have stayed out two more games if he really wanted to stick it to the Pats as you seem to imply. He chose not to. His reward was a 50% cut in pay.

    4. If it is so easy to find guards, why do teams like Buffalo, Dallas and the Colts have trouble finding them? That is just such a cop-out claiming the position is not important. You sound like Michael Felger. The same argument can be made about any lower paying position like center, kicker, fullback, tight end etc. The bottom line is you still need talented players to win, not scrubs off the waiver wire. Talented players need to be paid or else you get Kyle Arrington instead of Asante Samuel.

  • Cherokee Chief

    Hold on “delusional” Erik in Concord I sort like Kyle Arrington. At least we got our investment return in Kyle on the field and that’s more than we can say for Logan. Now with the wonderful Tag maybe we can get some of it back by way of a good trade for Mr. Mankins. BTW, what’s in the water there in NH that causes such irrational thinking? But then, maybe it’s just your politics. Sounds like you’ve stayed up late to ‘spin’ your ‘facts and figures’ to fit a particular agenda. Actually, your cited facts are revisionist and are not close to being accurate or even truthful. Look it’s simple: the fact is Mankins wants his perceived value in money and whether he’s correct or not remains subjective. The fact is he won’t get it from the Pats and that’s not subjective. You also seem to give little value to the fact that the NFL is as business as business gets and some deals just aren’t made. However, that doesn’t make management evil capitalists. But, then again maybe that’s just how you think for it’s certainly how you write.

  • Dave S

    Logan is a great guard. Wish his agent and he would come to his senses. Don’t think it will happen tho. If he doesn’t agree to a long term contract, I’d rather see a trade for draft pick(s), or a player….the savings in $$$ should be used where really needed…$10 mil goes a long way to drafting a young OT, pass rushing DE /OLB and DB or signing a FA in a position of need.

    BB has the picks and $$$ to make this young team really good for a few years down the road….one guard isn’t going to be a difference maker IMHO.

  • Erik Concord, NH

    To Cherokee Chief:

    If you “like Kyle Arrington” you must love bad cornerbacks who can’t cover. Arrington is nothing more than a special teams guy or dime back at this point. Maybe he gets better with more experience, but at this time he’s not good enough to cover a quality NFL WR. Personally I would rather see somebody who can cover especially since rushing / sacking the opposing QB is a problem.

    Who appointed you as Bob Kraft’s business agent BTW? The Patriots don’t spend over the salary cap and consistently make lots of money, I doubt they need you advocating for low-balling all the non Tom Brady players to make a buck. Besides, it hardly seems prudent to me to pay a one year franchise amount of $10.1 million, when you probably could have signed the guy if you would have offered the $7.5 – 8 million per year (with the expected guarantees) last winter. After all, there was not even a salary cap last year so the Patriots could have paid whatever if they had chosen too. Paying Mankins won’t break Kraft nor make them less profitable. You know that BB and Kraft will keep payroll down by making strategic veteran cuts in 2011. I would expect Kaczur and Tully Banta-Cain are both targets based on their play in 2010 and their 2011 contract numbers. They probably let go veterans like Sammy Morris, Fred Taylor, Kevin Faulk, maybe Ty Warren and a few others to keep total salaries down. The issue here is not to pay everybody absurd salaries, but to selectively pay the stars what you need to keep a championship team. You don’t win the championship with all undrafted rookie free agents or players on rookie contracts. You need some high quality veterans to win it all. Every team that wins it has some highly paid veteran players. Look at the Packers who have guys like Charles Woodson in addition to younger players.

  • Cherokee Chief

    Erik in Concord I like Kyle for just the reason(s) you seem to recognize but discount, he was just what we thought he was and we received a FULL dividend payment on our investment. BTW “consistently making lots of money” is not a bad thing, unless you want to give it away to begin with. But then what would be the sense? “Paying Mankins” what he and his agent wants is not the point, but consistent and smart business management by the Pats is. That’s exactly what they’ve done and continue to do in their personnel policies. As for “look(ing) at the Packers”, I see Crumpler, Gronkowski and Hernandez. I see Green-Ellis, Bodden, G. Warren, Mesko, Graham and others as examples of good, smart and solid acquisitions with which the Pats held firm to their proven business model. Frankly, I see no reason to change now. Erik, if you’re a Pats fan, I can’t figure why you would want to change either. Unless, you want to “give it away to begin with” and there we delve into your politics and not sports negotiation.

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  • Nahbody

    Makes me proud that no one is Boston is making a huge deal out of this.  If this was the same crap team of a couple years ago, this would be the only Bruins news we’d care about until the beginning of the year. “Did you hear the B’s signed Ray’s son?”  Not this year, and not soon.

  • A Gibbons

    I am saving my money for the horses.

  • slim

    great trade stanley cup will be back in boston next year

  • oldtimehockey

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