There are a lot of things the Ravens should be worried about between now and the start of the 2008 season. Keeping Terrell Suggs long term should not be one of them. If it is - or if it becomes one - they have no one to blame but themselves.
But give the Ravens the benefit of the doubt on this, as in most issues of this nature. Signing Suggs to a contract that will make him and the franchise content seems easy to do. There's so little standing between them and financial bliss, not even the extra $800,000-plus Suggs wants to be paid this season because he believes he should have been franchised as a defensive end.
It's not a small or insignificant amount. But it's also not big enough or significant enough to prevent the Ravens and Suggs from resolving it. It's not even a matter of the two sides making peace. It's barely even a matter of there being two sides. And as for making peace, it's hard to imagine a negotiation in the NFL, particularly one that involves the routinely contentious franchise tag, being more peaceful.
Thank Suggs for that. The Ravens should. They should reward him for it, too.
Sure, giving a pro athlete credit for not being a pain in the rear during contract negotiations is roughly akin to slapping him on the back for not lying anymore about his steroid use. However, Suggs' calm, reasoned stance comes off as genuine.
It would have been wrong from the start to presume that Suggs would approach contract talks the way he approached referee Mike Carey in that 2005 game in Detroit, as Carey memorably described it that day, "with malice in his heart." Suggs isn't even that kind of player on the field anymore. He had fewer sacks in 2007, yes, but also fewer overreactions, fewer overly aggressive acts and fewer dumb penalties. How about that? He wasn't frozen in time as a rambunctious 20-year-old, after all.
Off the field? Suggs' words and demeanor so far ought to earn him points in this round of talks. Sometimes, there really is nothing wrong with applauding someone who brings perspective to a situation that almost always produces none of it. In past offseasons, you didn't see the Asante Samuelses or Walter Joneses (or Chris McAlisters) of the world saying things like, "I had an average to slightly-above-average season," the way Suggs described 2007 to The Sun's Mike Preston this week.
Or hear them admit their disappointment about being franchised while adding, "But this also keeps me in a Ravens uniform, and this is just another way of eventually getting it done."
