Does Von Miller deserve to be the highest-paid defensive player in the NFL?
Absolutely. Without a doubt. He has earned every penny. Without him, there’s no way the Broncos would have upset Cam Newton and Carolina to win Super Bowl 50.
But can Miller actually be worth nearly $20 million per season to the Broncos?
No way. No how. In the NFL, spending all that cash on anything except a quarterback is unlikely to provide a good return on investment.
And those two competing pieces of logic are my best explanation why it has taken forever for the Broncos to cut a deal with their 27-year-old linebacker.
Paying Miller is a math problem. Itap a problem that Denver has taken way too long to figure out, maybe because the numbers don’t compute.
Paying Miller is the right thing to do. But is it the smart thing to do?
Somewhere between tugging on Superman’s cape at the Super Bowl and turning into an Elvis imitator on “Dancing with the Stars,” Miller grew larger than life and bigger than the team.
Thatap a problem for the Broncos. And itap a problem that has revealed the cracks in a championship organization. This is not meant as criticism of either franchise president Joe Ellis or general manager John Elway, who have done great work.
But, in a league where parity dares a champion to fail, itap not unreasonable to wonder if this contract tiff between the Broncos and their best player will be remembered as the beginning of the end for Denver, the crowning final glory for more than three decades of excellence thatap attributable to the passionate ownership of Pat Bowlen.
You, me and Miller all know this to be true: If the Broncos really wanted to pay the Super Bowl MVP top dollar, the deal could have been closed in two hours shortly after the championship parade rolled through downtown Denver. Thatap the way a football team running at peak efficiency would have handled it. Get the deal done. Or move on from Miller and move him out of town.
Instead, these negotiations have revealed a franchise finally feeling the leadership void left by Mr. B stepping down to battle Alzheimer’s disease. While saving nickels to write an outrageous check to Miller, the Broncos went shopping at the bargain bin for a quarterback, and there’s a reason Mark Sanchez will count only $4.5 million against the salary cap this season: He isn’t very good. In a laughable strategy, Denver tried to bully Miller by imposing an artificial deadline on reaching a deal in June, and he responded in exactly the manner any superstar would, by laughing in the face of Elway. And now the team has dawdled so long reaching an agreement with Miller that it has delayed getting down to serious business with receiver Emmanuel Sanders, the team’s best offensive player and also a man who is confident enough to play out the final season on his deal and go score the money he deserves in another NFL city.
If thatap not your definition of a mess, then maybe you might want to pass on that next round of orange Kool-Aid.
I have been a loud advocate of Miller getting his money. He’s the Vonster. And we all love him.
But in an era where the quickest way to get Bayless wealthy in the media world is to stubbornly refuse there are any colors in the rainbow except black and white, some us can detect shades of gray in a debate. So I can see a reason why the Broncos would be ambivalent about committing such a high percentage of their cap space to Miller, who was fantastic in the playoffs, but was not quite as good as Oakland edge-rusher Khalil Mack during the regular season, when the Vonster recorded 11 sacks, or one fewer than Houston’s Whitney Mercilus.
All the rules in the NFL are rigged in favor of the quarterback. Thatap why 20 of the 25 highest-paid players in the league are quarterbacks. In this filthy-rich dudes club, you will find Aaron Rodgers, Joe Flacco, Tom Brady, Eli Manning, Russell Wilson and Ben Roethlisberger, who have all won rings. Notice a pattern there? Quarterbacks rule in the NFL.
There’s a whole lot of cash among defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh ($19.06 million salary in 2016), defensive tackle Fletcher Cox ($17.1 million), defensive end Oliver Vernon ($17 million), linebacker Justin Houston (16.8 million) and defensive end J.J. Watt ($16.7 million). Together, they could buy a fleet of yachts, if they so desired. But pool all their money, and they have been unable to buy a single Super Bowl victory.
Miller has earned his shiny championship ring and a fat, new contract.
But no matter how much the Broncos are willing to pay Miller, it cannot ensure the team will be back in the Super Bowl.
