The last thing Thomas Davis wanted to be was a distraction. The 34-year-old just wanted to play football. Unfortunately, when a series of events happens during the offseason like what happened to the Carolina Panthers, sometimes it’s hard to focus on football. When defensive coordinator Steve Wilks says that he’s going to limit Davis’ reps so that hybrid linebacker Shaq Thompson can get on the field more and Davis said that he would do whatever was necessary to help the team, that wasn’t a distraction. When Davis announced that he may be interested in staying for another year past his current contract, that wasn’t a distraction. But when general manager Dave Gettleman got fired eight days before training camp and the fans say that it may have been due to Davis’ request for a contract extension, that may have been tilting towards distraction. But now that Davis has his extension, it’s water under the bridge. The only thing to do now, in Davis’ own words, is go win the Super Bowl.
A message from @ThomasDavisSDTM 😎
(And @Jonathanstewar1) pic.twitter.com/PPsB1pbefo
— Carolina Panthers (@Panthers) August 15, 2017
Davis, who called thoughts that he had anything to do with Gettleman’s firing “unfair”, signed a one-year, incentive-laden extension yesterday which will pay him $6.75 million in 2018, a season when he will be 35 years old. Players like London Fletcher, Ray Lewis, and James Harrison were still able to be productive linebackers at that age, and a contract like this can be beneficial to both the Panthers and Davis. It gives Davis, a beloved player whom fans call “Mr. Panther” or “the epitome of the Keep Pounding motto”, more guaranteed money ($3 million over the next two years), and it gives the Panthers a Pro Bowl linebacker at a modest price. Fellow 2017 Pro Bowl linebacker Brian Orakpo makes $9 million and is two years younger than Davis.
“It’s extremely important to be able to just focus in on football. There’s one thing to be said about not really worrying about it, and letting it take care of itself, allowing the agents and general manager and the people upstairs to do their job; but as a player, you try to focus in as much as you possibly can, but at the same time, you find yourself thinking about it sometimes. At the end of the day, I’m here, the contract is done, and it’s all about moving forward for the season.”
While many fans worried that when former general manager Marty Hurney was rehired as interim GMÂ he might “open up the checkbook” and hand out large contracts to any players that were interested in receiving a higher paycheck, citing the bloated salaries given to players such as Olindo Mare and Jake Delhomme during Hurney’s previous tenure with the team. But Davis never wanted a bloated salary, he wanted a contract that not only worked for himself, but one that didn’t limit the team from being able to sign other players in the future.
“It’s a deal unlike what most people thought, you hear a lot of people talking about it on the outside, when it originally came out; Marty coming in and paying a boatload of money, but people have to understand and realize that’s not what we were looking for at the beginning anyway,” Davis said after practice today, “we just wanted something in place, something moving forward, and now we have that and now we’re moving forward.”
