The lingering impasse between the Bengals and first-round pass rusher Shemar Stewart ultimately traces to the inability of the two sides to finalize a rookie deal. However, Stewart would have taken the field for the team’s offseason program if the Bengals had offered an acceptable participation agreement.
In theory, a participation agreement gives the player financial protection against an injury suffered while taking part in the offseason program. The goal is to give the player the same deal he would have gotten, if he hadn’t been injured.
PFT has compared the Bengals’ participation agreement with the language used by another team. There are very real differences.
For example, Cincinnati’s agreement applies if the player “sustains a disabling NFL football-related injury.” At least one other team removes the phrase “disabling,” which introduces ambiguity and (potentially) an avenue for the team lawyering their way out of the deal.
The Bengals’ agreement also doesn’t contain a clear commitment to give Stewart a contract commensurate with being the 17th overall pick in the draft. The other team’s expressly says that the terms “shall be commensurate” with the player’s slot.
Also, the other team’s deal has a paragraph that explains the purpose of the agreement: To provide financial protection for an injury resulting from participation in the offseason program, and to put him in approximately the same financial position he would have been in, but for the injury.
Frankly, no player should ever sign a participation agreement. If the team wants the player to behave like an employee, the team should make the player an employee by signing him to a contract.
In Stewart’s case, a participation agreement that would have more clearly promised to give him the financial package he would have gotten without the injury would have gotten him on the field for the offseason program — and it would have deferred the thornier issue of working out final contract language until training camp.
As to the contract language, Stewart has asked for the same default language used in the contract signed last year by tackle Amarius Mims, who was taken with the 18th overall pick. That’s relevant to the participation agreement because, as it relates to the participation agreement, Stewart was told (we’re told) that it wouldn’t be fair to use different language from the language in Mims’s participation agreement.
If that logic is good enough for the participation agreement, it should be good enough for the contract, too. But the Bengals won’t use the same default language as to guaranteed money for Stewart as they used for Mims.
And so the impasse continues. While many issues with the Bengals flow from frugality, this problem primarily flows from stubbornness.
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