Restricted Free Agents Have Contract Offers Extended to June 15

With five restricted free agents, the Browns have the most of any team in the NFL. In order to give these players more time to make a decision, the team has extended the one-year contract offers to June 15. Should these players still decide they don’t want these one-year tenders, some of them could be leaving over a million dollars on the table.

Of those five players – Jerome Harrison, D’Qwell Jackson, Lawrence Vickers, Abe Elam, and Matt Roth – only Harrison has been practicing with the team during OTAs. Ideally, all these players would be practicing, even though these sessions are voluntary, as a way to make a good impression and further expose themselves to the coaching staff.

I know I’ve gone over this a number of times before, but this is really a dumb move by these players. There’s no worse way to make yourself look bad than by not showing up to these workouts at all and assuming a new contract is coming your way. I think the explanation as to why the team wants to offer these players the one-year tenders is one that makes a lot of sense – why should the team tie up a lot of money in players they’ve hardly seen or, better yet, aren’t necessarily all that good in the first place?

It really would be in these players’ best interests to just sign these offers and get on with the reason of the summer.