Mon Mar 30, 2009 1:15 pm EDT
Michael Vick thinks Michael Vick is still worth a huge contract
I don't know what kind of access Michael Vick has had to newspapers, magazines and the Internet in prison, but it seems like the news that he is no longer a hot commodity has not yet filtered down to Michael Vick.
In papers he submitted to a bankruptcy court, Vick indicated that he plans on making $10 million per season, which I'm pretty sure would be a record for an ex-con who had a career quarterback rating of 75.7 when he went away. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
The embattled Atlanta Falcons quarterback is hoping to earn as much as $10 million a year or more, according to court filings in his bankruptcy case. Under the plan he submitted to the court, Vick would keep the first $750,000 of his annual income over the next five years. After that, a percentage would go to his creditors based on a sliding scale. [...]
In a March 4 court filing, Vick’s attorneys say he “has every reason to believe upon his release, he will be reinstated into the NFL, resume his career and be able to earn a substantial living.”
“He is hopeful to play quarterback,” Daniel Meachum, an attorney and business manager for Vick, said in an interview. “There is no person with his talent in that position in all the league.”
That may have been true at one time, but there are also no quarterbacks in the league who have spent the last nine months sitting in a jail cell and eating prison food. I'm not a nutritionist or anything, but I'm pretty sure that's not what NFL team doctors would recommend for keeping a guy in optimum game shape.
The fact of the matter is that no one knows how Vick will perform when he gets out of the joint, though it seems extraordinarily unlikely that he'll look exactly the same as he did when he went in. Factor in the amount of teams scared off by the P.R. nightmare, and I think we're looking at a salary closer to $605,000, which was last year's veteran minimum for a seventh-year player.
