When It Comes To Wilfork, Pats Will Either Pay Now Or Pay Later

It remains one of the unassailable truths of professional sports, even in a bad economy.
 
And, for some reason, the Patriots continue to fight it.
 
When it comes to high-end talent, the closer you get to free agency, the more it costs. The longer you wait, the worse it gets.
 
Exhibit A: Vince Wilfork.
 
For the last five-plus years, the Patriots nose tackle has been working off a six-year rookie contract that was skewed so heavily in favor of the team that similar pacts are no longer permitted across the league. But at the time, the deal gave the Pats a lifetime to decide if Wilfork could play at this level and fit into their system. It gave them over a half-decade to gauge his worth when it came to the dreaded (from a team perspective) second contract.
 
We’re now entering the final year of the original arrangement, and the Pats still can’t come up with a magic number for Wilfork. New England had more time to choose its next nose tackle than Americans had to choose their next president, and still, we’re on the verge of another holdout from another homegrown contributor who has been forced to go to the wall.
 
Wilfork may or may not begin an official holdout when the Pats convene for a mandatory minicamp starting Wednesday in Foxborough. He’s hinted at both courses of action. It could go either way. No one knows. What we do know is that for most of the past two years talks between he and the team haven’t gone anywhere.
 
Wilfork, of course, is just the latest Patriot to fall into this hole. Deion Branch, Richard Seymour and Asante Samuel highlight the group that came before him. And to this point, only one of them, Seymour, has been able to get what they wanted out of the Patriots -- and it certainly didn’t come easy. The rest have had to go down to the wire. In the cases of Branch and Samuel, they had to go elsewhere to get that second contract.
 
What all those cases have in common is that New England played the waiting game and lost. And make no mistake, however it shakes out with Wilfork, a loss for the Patriots is coming.
 
I’m just curious what was stopping New England from getting to this earlier. It would have been a lot cheaper for the Patriots to extend Wilfork last year, and it would have been a veritable bargain in 2007. It’s not like this situation snuck up on them. The termination date on Wilfork’s rookie contract was presumably written in English.
 
This is a part of the Pats’ team-building methodology that I never understood. Branch, for example, made it clear to everyone that he could play early on in his career. He caught 10 passes in the Super Bowl his second year, and was named the game’s MVP in his third. His quarterback loved him. He represented just about everything the organization wanted out of its players (except durability). Yet, it wasn’t good enough.
 
Samuel took a bit longer to emerge, but when he did, it was obvious that he had big-play talent and a big-game knack. He became a worthy successor to Ty Law. Yet, it wasn’t good enough.
 
Both Branch and Samuel could have been locked up to second contracts on team-friendly terms had the Pats gotten serious earlier. But they waited. They low-balled. And then it was too late. Leverage swung in favor of the player and the price got too steep.
 
History has so far repeated itself with Wilfork. I don't know if it’s possible for him to have given the Pats any more bang for their buck for the past five years. I don’t know if it’s possible for him to have justified a draft position (21st overall) more than he has. He played a prominent role on a Super Bowl-winning team in his rookie year and has been an every-game starter and a top-three NFL nose tackle since.
 
What more do the Pats need to see?
 
Bill Belichick and the rest of the organization have been so good for so long at evaluating talent and knowing when to cut ties with older veterans that we tend to ignore their faults. But this is emerging as one. Letting go of guys in their 30s makes sense (we’ll see about Mike Vrabel). But letting guys go in their mid-20s just because they don’t want to negotiate a little earlier? How is that good business?
 
Maybe it’s pride. Maybe the Pats felt the system made Samuel and the quarterback made Branch. Maybe it becomes personal, where competitiveness takes over after negotiating with a particular agent over a period of time and concessions become that much harder to make. Maybe it’s just being a hard-ass businessman. After all, those rookie deals are great for the team after you get past the first year or two. Hey Vince, the contract says six years. You signed it, big fella. Something like that.
 
Or maybe the Pats just get too picky with some of their own guys. Branch was injury-prone. Samuel wasn’t physical. Wilfork is overweight. Maybe they consider those things to be fatal flaws.
 
I don’t know what it is. I just know that Wilfork’s price tag is probably outrageous at this point. Sources say that Wilfork told the team last year he would accept Seymour money, which would mean guarantees in the $24 million range with an average annual value around $8 million. The Pats declined. Now, $24 million isn’t going to get it done, not with Albert Haynesworth’s $41 million in guarantees sitting on the table in Washington.
 
So either the Patriots have to give Wilfork a contract they don’t like (which is something they hate to do more than just about anything else), or they have to hope he plays out this final year just so they can franchise him and officially start World War III next offseason.
 
If they don’t do one or the other, he’s a goner.
 
In other words, as it stands right now, there is no happy ending for the Pats when it comes to Wilfork. They are going to be on the short end any way you slice it.
 
And you can only wonder why it had to come to this point.

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Catch Felger on “Sports Sunday” on Comcast Sportsnet Sunday night at 10 p.m. Reach him at mfelger@weei.com.