Category Archives: Le’Veon Bell

Why was Melvin Gordon’s Holdout so Different from Le’Veon Bell’s?

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By Drew Gallagher

October 7, 2019

Drew Gallagher is a second-year Sport Management student with a minor in General Business at Bowling Green State University. Drew is a proud native of Aurora, Illinois and is interested in many sports, but focuses primarily on baseball and football at the professional and collegiate levels.

On Wednesday, September 25th, Melvin Gordon of the Los Angeles Chargers decided to end his hold out and returned to his team. His hold out for a better contract began in training camp and lasted until week 4 of the NFL season (Gordon, 2019). In the middle of the holdout in early August, “Melvin Gordon’s agent Damarius Bilbo [had] requested that the Los Angeles Chargers trade his client” (Abdeldaiem, 2019, para 1). The holdout included its share of ups and downs, but still seemed relatively quiet. This is especially apparent when put side-by-side with Le’Veon Bell’s 2018 holdout which lasted the entire season.

As a reminder, Le’Veon Bell was a member of the Steelers who was also in the last year of his contract. He decided in training camp that he wanted to hold out for a long-term deal with his current team. Both his camp and the Steelers had many separate contract negotiations throughout the preseason and early 2018 season, but no new deal came about. Because of this, he ended up foregoing the entire amount of the franchise tender that the Steelers had offered him, and he sat out the entire season. Gordon however, has had very similar circumstances, but still gave in to his holdout not even a fourth of the way through the year. One of these similarities is that both teams seemed to get by equally fine with their backup running backs (Ekeler and Conner) who thrived without their first string counterparts. This begs the question: how did the differences between the two affect the outcomes of their respective holdouts?

For starters, media coverage seemed to play a big role in how people perceived both incidents. Le’Veon Bell is known to be a very outspoken individual. He was constantly doing interviews and posting on social media to talk about his displeasure with how his holdout was going. Because of this, I believe that the media had a lot more interest in the story. Gordon, on the other hand, seemed to stay relatively quiet during his holdout and therefore had less coverage coming his way. This could very well be part of the reason why Gordon decided to come out of his holdout part way through the year unlike Bell. Without the constant media coverage, fans weren’t as eager to see the deal get done. This meant that Gordon had significantly less leverage than Bell when it came to contract negotiations.

Another reason that could be equally responsible for the difference in the holdouts is that If Gordon didn’t “play at all in 2019, his contract would… just transfer to 2020, when he would then be scheduled to earn $5.6 million once again” (Graziano, 2019, para. 5). However, Bell did not “have this problem because of the franchise-tag rules, which would have forced the Steelers to pay him nearly $21 million this year if they had wanted to franchise him for the third year in a row” (Graziano, 2019, para 6).

Whether the contracts themselves had the largest impact on the differences between how the respective holdouts ended up could definitely be debated. What is clear though is that the difference in media coverage definitely affected them in some way. I can definitely see similar circumstances affecting future holdouts as well.

 

References

Abdeldaiem, A. (2019, August 1). Melvin Gordon’s agent requests trade amid contract dispute with Chargers. Sports Illustrated. Retrieved from https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/08/01/melvin-gordon-trade-request-chargers-contract-dispute

Gordon, G. (2019, September 25). Melvin Gordon ending holdout, will report to Chargers. nfl.com. Retrieved from http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000001058986/article/melvin-gordon-ending-holdout-will-report-to-chargers

Graziano, D. (2019, August 8). Why you can’t compare the Ezekiel Elliott and Melvin Gordon holdouts to Le’Veon Bell’s. ESPN. Retrieved from https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/27342231/why-compare-ezekiel-elliott-melvin-gordon-holdouts-leveon-bells

National Media Aims to Make Le’Veon Bell Bad Guy in Holdout Fiasco

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Drew Gallagher is a first-year undergraduate student at Bowling Green State University. He is a working towards getting a major in Sport Management and a minor in General Business. He is a proud native of Aurora, Illinois and is interested in many sports. He generally focuses on Baseball and Football at both the professional and collegiate levels.

Another week goes by as Le’Veon Bell still has not signed his $14.5 million franchise tender with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Being as good as he is, one would think that his teammates and fans would be incredibly eager to get him back. This might have been the case when the Steelers started 1-2-1; but after two big wins against the Falcons and Bengals, and two consecutive 100-yard, 2-TD rushing games from James Conner, fans in Pittsburgh are much less reluctant to beg for Bell to come back.

Le’Veon Bell is still of course the best running back in the league. Those involved with the Steelers have seemed to come to terms with the fact that chances are, they won’t have him on their team next year no matter when he comes back this year. Most fans have even gone a step further and are in hopes that he won’t come back at all. According to a poll surveyed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the largest newspaper in the Pittsburgh area, 66% of people don’t want him to come back (Cook, 2018). Ben Roethlisberger has also expressed his neutral stance on the topic (Gentille, 2018). While this may not completely be his fault, national media has tended to put the blame on Bell throughout this entire process.

At first, they reported the story as if he was a selfish person and wasn’t concerned with how his team would fare this year without him. While this may be true from a certain standpoint, it seems that it is rare for anybody in the national media to take Bell’s side throughout the holdout. The truth is that this entire issue has been a long time coming between Le’Veon Bell and his current team of five years.

Bell has previously expressed communication issues with the Steelers regarding a contract extension for the pro-bowl running back. These issues have dated back to the 2016 off-season after his rookie contract had expired. He has been tagged twice since then as the two sides have still been unable to reach an agreement on an extension. Near the end of last season, Bell made it known to the media that if the Steelers decided to tag him again, he would consider holding out or even retiring (Quinn, 2018). During this year’s training camp, he also made it clear multiple times that he would not play in the regular season without a long-term contract and a good amount of guaranteed money. The media still seemed to be surprised and disappointed when he didn’t sign his franchise tender before the season started, and they continue to feel the same way every week that has gone by since.

The fact still remains that Bell has been over-worked by the Steelers in the past and has continuously risked injury while playing a position that is arguably the most dangerous in an already dangerous sport. Continuing to play would be a huge risk for Bell without a long-term contract. We’ll see how long this holdout lasts, but I’d be willing to bet that Bell will continue to remain the bad guy in the eyes of the media until then.

 

References

Cook, R. (2018, October 15). Ron Cook: One Steeler ready for Le’Veon Bell’s return — James Conner. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved from http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/ron-cook/2018/10/15/Ron-Cook-Steelers-running-back-James-Conner-welcome-back-Le-Veon-Bell-Deion-Sanders-Ben-Roethlisberger-ESPN/stories/201810160027

Gentille, S. (2018, October 23). Ben Roethlisberger has thoughts on ‘Coach Todd’ and Le’Veon Bell. Sort of. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved from http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/steelers/2018/10/23/patrick-peterson-steelers-ben-roethlisberger-937-the-fan-leveon-bell-james-conner/stories/201810230110

Quinn, S. (2018, October 10). The unabridged timeline of Le’Veon Bell’s holdout. In 247sports.com. Retrieved from https://247sports.com/nfl/pittsburgh-steelers/ContentGallery/LeVeon-Bell-absence-timeline-121486548/#121486548_4