Odell Beckham Jr has apparently dropped his asking price after still finding himself without a team throughout this offseason, Albert Breer has claimed.
Whenever a player manages to miss the entirety of a season dur to injury, there’s a good chance that they enter the state of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ in the eyes of a lot of people around the league, but that certainly hasn’t been the case for Odell Beckham Jr.
That’s largely because there was some belief that he might have been able to come back last season, as he reportedly visited a number of teams in hopes of coming back, but clearly the teams didn’t think he had recovered enough to warrant splashing all the money he was asking for, and so he went through the whole 2022 season on the sidelines.
Now though, attention is ramping up again, especially after he held a workout in front of a large portion of NFL teams a few weeks back, with videos of the event showing that he still has something left in the tank. However there still remains the issue of compensation, but it seems as though Beckham Jr has had second thoughts on the matter.
Odell Beckham Jr not looking for the big bucks anymore?
Reports had suggested that last season during negotiations Beckham Jr was asking for as much as $20m a year to play (which given his production, you could argue was warranted, but his injuries probably made those demands ridiculous), but according to Albert Breer in his mailbag column for SI.com, Beckham Jr is set to ask for a little less going forward:
Word before his appearance at the Arizona Biltmore on Tuesday was that Odell Beckham Jr. was looking for something in the neighborhood of $15 million per year. That’s down from where he was previously, so I do think there’s room for negotiation here, and I do think showing up at the hotel where the owners’ meetings were taking place was a savvy move from a business standpoint.
Still too much for Odell Beckham Jr to be banking on?
A salary of $15m a year (assuming that would be the average), would put Beckham Jr as the 23rd highest-paid wideout in the league (as per SpotRac), which still seems like something of a stretch for someone who has come off two ACL injuries in two seasons in 2020 and 2021.
If it had just been the one and he was asking for that last season, teams might have been more willing to make a deal, but at that price I’d be shocked to see it happen. As Breer points out, perhaps this is just a case of him showing he’s willing to negotiate on the price and it won’t end up being anywhere near that figure, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on moving forward through the offseason.