Your move, Odell.
The ball is in your court … for now.
Will you ask for the moon in contract negotiations and force the Giants to reluctantly trade you?
Or will you negotiate in good faith and accept a fair and reasonable deal that is mutually beneficial and promise to toe the behavioral line that John Mara and Dave Gettleman have drawn in the sand?
Speak now, Odell, or forever hold your peace — before another team makes the Giants an offer they can’t refuse.
If that was an olive branch Mara extended you on Wednesday, reach up and catch it. With two hands.
Do you love New York?
Do you love being a Giant?
Tell us. Show us.
Now we follow the money.
It’s what Deep Throat urged Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate, and it holds true between now and next month’s NFL draft during Beckhamgate.
Odell Beckham’s otherworldly talent and work ethic and obsession with being legendary trump the headaches he has given Mara, and more recently new GM Gettleman and head coach Pat Shurmur, even though Beckham World has clearly become more than a tempest in a teapot for the Giants.
In fact, he is exactly the kind of generational player whom Gettleman is targeting in the draft.
Beckhamgate:
Do you want to be a Giant, Odell, or don’t you? How badly do the Giants want to pay him?
Beckhamgate now is about whether Beckham will be intransigent and hold firm to a sky-high demand that the Giants would be unwilling to meet and the prospect of a protracted holdout that would accompany any disruptive impasse.
Mara saying he wants Beckham to remain a Giant means Mara wants Beckham to remain a Giant as long as he is willing to accept a fiscally responsible deal. Mara has notably backed off saying he wants Beckham to be a Giant For Life.
Beckham saying last summer that he wants to be a Giant For Life always meant he wanted to be a Giant For Life as long as the Giants made him the highest-paid receiver in the league — which they will — and then some.
Remember what he said last July: “I believe that I will be, hopefully not just the highest-paid receiver in the league, but the highest paid, period.”
As unrealistic as Beckham himself probably knew it to be, it served as his opening shot across the bow.
If Beckham hadn’t fractured his left ankle last October, if the Giants hadn’t suffered through a 3-13 season, negotiations on an extension would have been easier than they figure to be now.
Gettleman has told us, “You don’t quit on talent.” But you could be forced to if that talent decides to hold your club hostage to his financial demands as Doughdell Beckham.
Beckham has no interest in playing out the fifth year of a contract that pays him $8.459 million in 2018. Nor should he. The Giants can take their sweet time at the negotiating table, and they are, and Beckham wanted them to show him the money yesterday.
Gettleman, who did not draft Beckham, is the new sheriff, and he is taking a harder line on B.S., and the last thing he wants is Shurmur having to deal with a daily, riotous distraction before he coaches his first Giants game.
“You watch people in the NBA, and it’s crazy what they get,” Beckham said last July. “There are people in the NFL who deserve that.”
Another shot across the bow.
The Giants returned fire in Orlando:
No one is bigger than the team.
Not this team.
Mara can tell us all he wants that he isn’t shopping Beckham. He let the genie out of the bottle when he divulged that no one was untouchable.
More significant is his reluctance to offer no guarantees and no promises that he and Steve Tisch will cut the checks in the future for Beckham.
Because he doesn’t know whether Beckham is interested in “Let’s Make A Deal.”
Gettleman tells us: “You don’t quit on talent.”
Beckham needs to assure the Giants — once and for all with his actions and words — that he has not and will not quit on them.
“Play ball!” doesn’t only apply to the start of the Yankees and Mets seasons.
It applies to you as well.
Your move, Odell.
