Kam Curl signed a two-year deal with the Rams worth $8.75 million base and potentially up to $12.75 million – not much more, salary-wise, than what the Commanders paid Jeremy Chinn – and now, a report has come out from Sam Fortier that stated the Commanders didn't offer Curl a deal.
Fair, given that Chinn’s deal was one year for slightly less base?
“There's probably no one that's gonna be on the team beyond three years from now that they just signed, other than maybe Dorance Armstrong, Tyler Biadasz, and Frankie Luvu, otherwise Adam Peters is just kind of kicking the can down the road,” Grant said. “He's building a bridge roster out of Rivera; the Peters roster is going to be next year and beyond, when he starts signing four and five-year contracts at high cost for the next wave of the core of the team.”
But here’s the thing: it seems they didn’t make an offer because they didn’t want him here?
“Fortier said Washington never made a formal offer to Curl, and ultimately the Commanders didn't offer a deal to Curl because the team believes that Jeremy Chinn is a better fit at box safety for their new defensive scheme,” GP said. “I found that interesting, and it surprised me. Does that surprise you?”
“Yes, it does,” was Danny’s simply reply. “My initial thinking was they'll go, ‘this is what we're prepared to offer you, you could probably get more and in fact we hope that you do – in other words, we would offer you something that wouldn't make as much sense for you to accept, because you've done nothing wrong and we'd like to reward that, but we don't want to do a long-term commitment or big money – and then the market played out the way that it did, and it surprised me that much more that they didn't offer something similar.”
GP was surprised for two reasons, one very similar to Danny.
“You can never really just believe what a GM and a coach are telling you, but that's all we got, and what Adam Peters has said pretty consistently about Curl was they really liked the player, and they were gonna kind of see what the market decided for him,” Grant said. “The market essentially said not quite ‘no, thank you,’ but you're not getting anything close to what you thought you were going to get, so if you're the Commanders, you have to actively opt out now basically.”
It wasn’t that they wanted him and couldn’t afford him, and it wasn’t that he wasn’t ‘worth it,’ either?
“He’s 25 and went from seventh-round pick to, over the last four years, a full-time starter who was one of their better players on defense and has, at time, been outstanding,” GP said. “The fan base has made it seem like this guy's an All-Pro when really he's just a good starter, but these are the kind of guys you pay and keep around. I don't have a problem with them not doing that, but it is definitely surprising to me that they didn't make a single offer. If you were to find out that he got $15 million a year and they valued him at six, let's say, that's a huge gap, I understand not making an offer that he's not gonna take. But when he goes and gets what is a little less than $5 million a year to go to the Rams, and you basically pay Jeremy Chinn the same thing as a hired gun from outside the org, that is surprising to me.”
Here’s the other catch:
“He’s homegrown, the kind of guy that you would think you would make an offer to, even if you're not keeping him, to at least try to – but he had a family member online say that the team offered him more money than the Rams did, and he turned it down to go to L.A.,” Grant said. “That is obviously not correct! Someone's wrong here, I guess the source that Fortier is talking to could be, but I'm going to believe that source that they just kind of were out of the Kam Curl business, which is surprising to me.”
“A lot of times when you get a comment that’s semi-off the record, it’s ‘we think he's a better fit’ or ‘we wish him well’ or whatever and you’re gonna have to read between the lines. In this case, I actually think ‘Chinn's a better fit for us’ is actually the case, right?” Danny replied. “You could have done this at that price, unless there was some kind of animosity that developed and he said ‘I'm leaving’ and then they couldn't go back on it.”
Still, Grant says, Curl has been productive, so it’s a little curious, and a lot surprising, but it makes all that discussion of the franchise tag look even sillier in hindsight.
“This is the biggest difference from just like what the fan base wanted to do and what actually happened, which was, ‘I'm okay paying him $16-17 million a year, he ends up getting $4.5 million from the Rams, and we find out the team not only didn’t match that, they didn't even make an offer.”
“There's a difference to me between ‘offers’ and offers, like, they can negotiate have discussions through the process, but I actually take them at their word that they think they got a better scheme fit,” Danny replied. “Most of the time it's just coach speak, something you say when out with the old, in with the new and you like the new thing better. But I actually believe them in this case that they said farewell Kam Curl, we've got somebody that we think is better for what we're trying to do based on objective analysis, which I think is welcome.”