AB Watch II: Quarantonio Brown

NomarsFool

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The Pats have a $4.5 million cap hit in 2020 for AB. That's not a huge number, but it's also not a small number. Has anyone seen anything about the chances the Patriots have any chance at getting rid of that?
 

Super Nomario

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The Pats have a $4.5 million cap hit in 2020 for AB. That's not a huge number, but it's also not a small number. Has anyone seen anything about the chances the Patriots have any chance at getting rid of that?
There's a chance of getting rid of it, but not in 2020. Miguel (Patscap) still thinks the Patriots will get a $3 MM credit for Aaron Hernandez at some point, but even that hasn't happened yet. If there's a grievance here, it will take years to resolve.
 

axx

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Isn't he likely to win the Patriots greivence? (And lose the Raiders one).
 

JohnnyTheBone

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Maybe? IANAL. I would imagine it depends on how he represented his legal situation to the Patriots when he signed.
I read at the time of the signing that the Pats had included specific language in the deal that it could be voided if he did anything to damage the reputation of the Patriots, or some-such. The definition of that is nebulous and therefore not ironclad, but it should give the team a fighting chance to win the grievance.
 

Harry Hooper

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I read at the time of the signing that the Pats had included specific language in the deal that it could be voided if he did anything to damage the reputation of the Patriots, or some-such. The definition of that is nebulous and therefore not ironclad, but it should give the team a fighting chance to win the grievance.
It's probably posted upthread here somewhere, but there was at least one article by an NFL reporter noting that grievance arbitrators routinely ignore specific language that deviates from the standard player contract.
 

lexrageorge

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aren't we supposed to be getting a credit for like the $15M we never paid him in 2019 but took a cap charge for?
Brown received a $9M signing bonus that the Pats so far have not had to pay out. But they did have the cap charges in 2019 and 2020 of $4.5M each for the bonus. That cap charge will stay until the grievance is resolved in a couple of years. NFL reporters were pretty much divided regarding Brown's chances of winning the grievance, so it seems like it's a 50/50 shot.

Brown is also trying to win the $10M or so of funny money (aka, non-guaranteed salary) that the Pats had put in his contract for 2020. As this was non-guaranteed salary for 2020, the Pats do not have to account for this on the cap. The general consensus is that Brown has zero chance of winning that part of his grievance.
 

NomarsFool

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Thanks. So, I guess the $4.5 million hit will definitely be there for 2020. The gift that keeps on giving.....
 

InstaFace

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Brown received a $9M signing bonus that the Pats so far have not had to pay out. But they did have the cap charges in 2019 and 2020 of $4.5M each for the bonus. That cap charge will stay until the grievance is resolved in a couple of years. NFL reporters were pretty much divided regarding Brown's chances of winning the grievance, so it seems like it's a 50/50 shot.
Thanks for the breakdown. But as for the bolded, there's a bit of a cognitive bias at work here:

Why are people attracted to 50:50 probabilities?
A working paper suggests that ambiguous odds are often interpreted as even

Barack Obama's intelligence officers told him, variously, that there was a probability of between 30% and 95% that Osama bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan in April 2011. The president was having none of it. “This is 50:50,” he said. “Look guys, this is a flip of the coin.” That bin Laden was found and killed does not reveal whose estimate of the odds was best. But new research argues that Mr Obama’s instinct—to treat probabilities as evenly split when they are uncertain—is widespread.

In a working paper Benjamin Enke and Thomas Graeber, both of Harvard University, argue that the bias towards 50:50 has shown up in many contexts. One is decision-making under (known) risks, such as gambling at a (fair) slot machine. Economists have long realised that people are more sensitive to changes in probabilities, the nearer they are to the boundaries of 0% and 100%. For example, the chance of a big win of, say, $1m rising from 0% to 1% seems much more significant than the chance of the same win rising from 20% to 21%. At the extremes, there is a tendency to compress odds towards evens.

Mr Obama did not face known odds, but ambiguous ones. Other researchers have found that such uncertainty has a similar compression effect: it can make people act as if they are facing known odds that are closer to 50:50 than might seem rational, given the information on offer. Messrs Enke and Graeber argue that this tendency even shows up in surveys of expectations about the performance of the economy and the stockmarket.

The authors suggest a new theory to explain this behaviour: “cognitive uncertainty”. It could be described as a simple lack of confidence. If people know that they may not be doing the sums right, or that their memory may be failing them, or that they are not sure what their own preferences are, then their choices depend less on the information they are presented and more on a “mental default” of equal probabilities.

In a series of online gambling experiments Mr Enke and Mr Graeber show that the more uncertain people are in their judgments, the more likely they are to hedge their bets—even when they have access to information that should, in theory, be useful.

Researchers have in the past suggested that odds of 50:50 are really code for “I don’t know”. That may well have been what was going through Mr Obama’s mind when faced with such a wide range of estimates. Forecasters put odds on events because words like “probable” and “likely” are interpreted very differently by different people. But numbers mean nothing without confidence.
If we don't know, then it's probably not just "50/50". Sorry to nitpick, that just bugs me for some reason.

As for the grievance, it's really stupid that in a league this rich and powerful, you can't get resolution on a simple labor arbitration in under a couple of years. Is that really typical of these contract disputes?
 

KiltedFool

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I can't even say I told you so, that's so far beyond even what I thought would come from him. Is there any other example of such a self immolation of reputation as AB?
 

Kliq

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It was pretty sad watching him yell at everyone on his lawn his phone out...and nobody is paying him any attention at all. Brown is lucky he was gifted enough to play football for a while; talk about someone who doesn't deserve their fame or fortune.
 

KiltedFool

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Going from the greatest of all time Jerry Rice talking about him being able to possible reach his level and supplant him to that frothing crap on his lawn? Wow.
 

DeadlySplitter

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it becomes clearer by the incident Bill seriously misjudged here and fucked our cap space. thanks for everything Bill but this is on par with the 2015 Miami game as far as goofing up your SB chances.
 

DennyDoyle'sBoil

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As horrible as the video is, what's on the tape is only kind of half the story.

The other half, at least if I'm interpreting what happened correctly, is that Brown took this video himself and seems to think that it supports his view of the world.
 

MuppetAsteriskTalk

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As horrible as the video is, what's on the tape is only kind of half the story.

The other half, at least if I'm interpreting what happened correctly, is that Brown took this video himself and seems to think that it supports his view of the world.
Yes, I can't understand anyone releasing this video of themselves thinking that it was a good idea.
 

Super Nomario

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There's a chance of getting rid of it, but not in 2020. Miguel (Patscap) still thinks the Patriots will get a $3 MM credit for Aaron Hernandez at some point, but even that hasn't happened yet. If there's a grievance here, it will take years to resolve.
Miguel thinks we will see AB's grievance settled before 3/18 and thinks the Patriots will win, freeing $9 MM. He might be being optimistic, but I would trust his word over mine on this:

View: https://twitter.com/patscap/status/1216837956134109188
 

Vegas Sox Fan

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I may be on an island here but I can't help but feel bad for this guy. I mean we could be easily dealing with another Chris Benoit situation at some point and what is anyone doing about it? To me it looks a lot like a human being that has been chewed up and spit out by the NFL Entertainment Industrial Complex. Years from now something tragic could happen to this person and we will do an autopsy and point out how horrifically damaged his brain is and then everything will make sense. But nothing is being done proactively for these people. To me, it's terribly tragic.
 
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Two Youks

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Jun 18, 2013
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I may be on an island here but I can't help but feel bad for this guy. I mean we could be easily dealing with another Chris Jericho situation at some point and what is anyone doing about it? To me it looks a lot like a human being that has been chewed up and spit out by the NFL Entertainment Industrial Complex. Years from now something tragic could happen to this person and we will do an autopsy and point out how horrifically damaged his brain is and then everything will make sense. But nothing is being done proactively for these people. To me, it's terribly tragic.
I think you mean Chris Benoit. Chris Jericho is still alive, fake fighting for the new AEW promotion.
 

PC Drunken Friar

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I may be on an island here but I can't help but feel bad for this guy. I mean we could be easily dealing with another Chris Jericho situation at some point and what is anyone doing about it? To me it looks a lot like a human being that has been chewed up and spit out by the NFL Entertainment Industrial Complex. Years from now something tragic could happen to this person and we will do an autopsy and point out how horrifically damaged his brain is and then everything will make sense. But nothing is being done proactively for these people. To me, it's terribly tragic.
I think he is an asshole who has severe mental problems. I doubt he will get the help he needs.

Re: the bolded...I think you mean Benoit?
 

InstaFace

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Would have been nice to have that $9M this season.
Maybe. If we get Emmanuel Sanders rather than Sanu, are we in the AFCCG this weekend? Given the team's other manifest problems, OL chief among them, I have a hard time thinking it would have been decisive. But it really wouldn't have taken all that much for us to end up with a bye, and I suppose who really knows.