Most of the players in uniform tonight will be focused on the Giants. Many of them will be fighting for jobs.
But the rest already have started work on the Bengals.
The NFL’s Opening Night is just seven days away, and the league’s first Sunday is 10 days from now. That means, as Bill Belichick likes to say, there are “a lot of balls in the air’’ for every team.
There might not be another period on the league calendar where focus is more splintered.
The prime-timers have to get ready for the season. The coaches have to balance working on Week 1 and getting a good enough evaluation on the bottom of the roster. The personnel folks have to make those evaluations and shape the structure of the 53-man group they’ll pick on Saturday. And then, there are the contract issues surrounding the team.
Here are the most important on- and off-field issues facing the Patriots as (some of) the players take the field at New Meadowlands Stadium tonight:
1. Tom Brady’s contract — The shocking thing about Belichick’s response to a series of questions Tuesday about negotiations wasn’t the dodging. It was the fact that it was the first time he’d been asked about it in a news conference all summer.
Apparently the memo hasn’t been passed out properly. This is the most important contract negotiation in the history of the franchise. And from a business standpoint, it is Issue No. 1 facing the team over the next seven months, considering Brady’s place as the greatest and most recognizable player in franchise history, the dollars that will be invested, and the role the NFL’s labor unrest plays.
NFL sources have indicated that while the doors are not closed on anything, once the whistle blows Sept. 12, if a contract isn’t done there’s a pretty good chance that Brady and the team won’t come to an agreement before 2011.
Will it have an affect on the 2010 season? Because of Brady’s approach, probably not. But it is something that hangs over the franchise until it gets done, and it’s an awfully big loose end to have to worry about.
2. Logan Mankins’s status — The Pro Bowl guard hasn’t set foot in the team facility in nearly eight months, and there is some risk to keeping the restricted free agent tender — a one-year, $1.54 million offer that binds him to the club — on him.
Mankins signing and reporting in midseason in order to get the six games he needs to accrue the year toward free agency could make for a serious disruption in the locker room. The issue could boil over if the relationship between player and club remains acrimonious at that point, which figures to be just when the team is finding out what it is.
