Everybody loves Teddy Bridgewater, and everyone wants to see him get healthy as quickly as possible.
Because of the devastating injury last August, it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone that the Vikings didn't pick up Teddy's 5th year option before the deadline last week. So, 2017 is his last year under contract...unless, it isn't.
I've never heard of this Collective Bargaining Agreement rule coming into play before but, here's the bit, according to Article 20 Section 2: “Any player placed on a Physically Unable to Perform list (‘PUP’) will be paid his full Paragraph 5 Salary while on such list. His contract will not be tolled for the period he is on PUP, except in the last year of his contract, when the player’s contract will be tolled if he is still physically unable to perform his football services as of the sixth regular season game.”(I yanked this text from a PFT article...no chance I was actually going to search for this in the NFL CBA)
Basically, if Teddy starts the season on the PUP because he isn't 100% yet(he would have to sit out first 6 weeks), then the rule states that he automatically remains under contract with the Purple next year with his 2017 salary, which is in the $1.3M range.
There's still a lot of time for this to play out, but this potentially makes things interesting for conversations between the Vikings and Bridgewater/agent guy.
The goal for the player, contractually at least, is to make as much money as he can while he's in the NFL. The goal for the team is to protect themselves financially from a guy that has already lost a full season and presumably more as this year gets rolling.
If Teddy doesn't get injured and continued the improvement that we had been seeing, the team picks up the option, no questions asked and $12+ million is going his way. But now we have Sam Bradford on the roster, and he played pretty well in his first campaign with the Vikes.
Sam's in the last year of his deal now and I assume the Vikings don't want to go thru the rat-race of free agency with him, so they either have to extend him to a multi-year deal(he turns 30 in November) or franchise tag him for like $20 million or so next Winter.
What to do with Teddy? When he gets healthy and proves he can return to form, give him a bump on that 2018 number(guys like Matt Cassel are making twice Teddy's 1.35)? What if he wants to start and isn't interested in sitting behind Sam, would he want to be moved?
PA chatted about it during #92Noon today ---->