How the Mighty Have Fallen

Just days after Michael Vick’s interview on 60 Minutes with James Brown where he acknowledges that he deserved to forfeit his $100,000,000+ contract that he had with the Atlanta Falcons, another NFL superstar looks to have gotten himself into an eerily similar situation.

On August 20, Plaxico Burress accepted a plea bargain with a two-year prison sentence for shooting himself in the leg with an unlicensed gun at a New York nightclub. He will be sentenced on September 22. This former New York Giants receiver faced a minimum of three and a half years if convicted guilty in court.

Burress’ lawyer Benjamin Brafman stated, “in my judgement, a two-year prison sentence is a very severe punishment.” I know he is rather biased, but I agree. He only shot himself, but could have done a lot worse and who knows what his intentions really were.

On top of the prison sentence, Burress looks to lose at least $23M of his $35M contract that he signed last September with the Giants. Like most NFL contracts, not all of the money was guaranteed. According to Paul Schwartz with the New York Post, there is $11.5 million in non-guaranteed base salaries in the contract, non-guaranteed roster bonuses of $3.5 million, non-guaranteed escalators of $5 million based on performance and $1.3 million in non-guaranteed workout bonuses among other things.

That might be less than a quarter of what Vick lost, but we are talking about millions & millions of dollars. Plus, we haven’t even mentioned future contracts in the NFL and endorsement deals.

Oh, how the mighty has fallen! It was only back in February of 2008 that Burress caught the game winning touchdown in the final minute of the Super Bowl to defeat the heavily favored (talk about an understatement) and undefeated New England Patriots. He was the King of the World in the Big Apple. King Kong couldn’t even bring him down…so I guess he decided to do it himself.

I hope that the rest of the NFL, soon-to-be NFLers, and every gun toting moron recognizes his stupidity and the possible consequences. What ever happened to Peace & Love?

Related posts:

1. Week 2: Top 5 NFL Stories
2. Who Let the Dogs Out?
3. Former Pac-10 Football Players Getting Paid

Tags: contract, gun charges, lost money, mighty have fallen, New York Giants, NFL, plaxico burress, plead guilty, super bowl

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 4:39 PM and is filed under NFL, New York Giants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.