Leonard Williams finally signed his franchise tag with the NY Giants on Wednesday, the night before the 2020 NFL Draft.
And, we finally have a resolution to what has been one of the biggest debacles in recent NY Giants team history. Leonard Williams will be playing for the Giants in 2020 – something most of us accepted long ago – for the hefty price tag of $17.1M.
Giants’ DL Leonard Williams is signing his franchise tender, per source.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 22, 2020
Question is whether it will pay him as a DE or DT; Williams thinks he’s the higher-priced DE, Giants think lower-priced DT. Difference is about $1.7 million in price.
As for the dispute between the position Williams played, and in turn, the amount of the franchise tender he’ll be playing under will be, the NY Giants don’t have much of a leg to stand on if they even wanted to go that route.
The former NY Jet predominately played 3-4 defensive end, which even though is sort of like playing 4-3 defensive tackle in that the player gets double-teamed a lot, is still a ‘defensive end’ by definition. Dexter Lawrence played far and away the most snaps at defensive tackle for Big Blue in 2019.
With GM Dave Gettleman presumably still wanting to lock Williams up to a long-term deal, it wouldn’t be the smartest thing in the world to poke the bear in hopes of saving $1.7M in a rebuilding season.
It likely would piss Williams and his agent off, only making it harder to secure a long-term contract and lower his cap hit which should be the team’s goal. Williams will be paid handsomely for his 2019 efforts, as getting paid $17M for just 0.5 sacks and 2 tackles-for-loss is great work if you can get it.
Many NY Giants fans had been holding out hope that Gettleman would do what he did with Josh Norman in 2016 and pull the franchise tag from Williams after negotiations had clearly failed. However, this was never going to be an option due to the GM surrendering a 2020 top-70 pick for the underachieving defensive lineman.
The only unpredictable part of this whole process for anyone with a brain has been trying to understand why it took Williams to long to sign his tender. What Williams and his agent did is akin to having a winning lottery ticket and deciding to take months to turn it in.
Williams would have been – and still is – able to negotiate a long-term deal after signing the franchise tender, so it made absolutely no sense not to sign it immediately — particularly with Gettleman’s history.
So, for even the biggest Leonard Williams trade haters like myself, it’s time to accept that Williams is a big part of this team’s future and just pray that he ends up working out.
I’m not holding my breath, as it’s worried me since day one that Gettleman will have way too much personally invested in this, but hope is all we can do at this point.