In early 2013, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick took a trip to south Mississippi to do a speaking engagement for his good friend Ray Perkins when Perkins was the coach at Jones Junior College in Ellisville.
Belichick decided to multi-task and made a side trip to Hattiesburg, where he worked out Southern Miss linebacker Jamie Collins for two hours one-on-one. Belichick most assuredly liked what he saw. Later that spring, the Patriots made Collins their first pick of the NFL Draft in the second round.
The Patriots have been abundantly rewarded.
Collins, a remarkably gifted athlete from the tiny community of McCall Creek in southwest Mississippi, has started 41 of his 50 games, totaling 285 career tackles, 10.5 sacks, five interceptions, 10 forced fumbles, four fumble recoveries, one defensive touchdown and one blocked extra point. That’s all. He played in the Pro Bowl last year and played every snap of the Patriots’ Super Bowl XLIX victory. He led the Pats in tackles in that Super Bowl and in the 2014 and 2015 seasons. He is generally rated as one of the 10 best linebackers in the NFL.
That’s what makes Monday’s news so stunning. The Patriots traded Collins to the win-less Cleveland Browns for a future third-round draft choice. They did what?
Yes, they did. It sounds like an April Fool’s story, but it was a Halloween shocker. And it was typical Belichick when you really look at it. Collins becomes an unrestricted free agent after this season. Belichick doesn’t want to pay him what he knows Collins will bring on the free agent market. Belichick figures he’ll just make another side trip to another college and find someone else to plug in for Jamie Collins.
Belichick has done this many times before. Do the names Deion Branch, Richard Seymour and Randy Moss ring a bell? Those three – and many more – became Super Bowl winning stars at New England and then were cast off because the Patriots didn’t want to pay them.
Tom Brady makes $20.5 million a year for the Patriots. Nobody else is even close.
So, Collins goes from a Super Bowl contender to the lowly Browns, and, at first glance you say, “Poor Jamie Collins.”
No, he is about to be rich, rich Jamie Collins. His original contract, negotiated by Hattiesburg-based agent Bus Cook, called for an average of about $940,000 over his first four seasons before he could become an unrestricted free agent.
He is about to add some zeroes.
The Cleveland Browns did not make this trade planning to keep Collins for just the rest of this season and then let him go. They made this trade to make Collins the cornerstone of their defense and have said as much.
They have more than $50 million in salary cap room. They have stockpiled early draft choices. They have the opportunity to get better quickly and it looks like they plan to do it with defense.
The Browns will have three choices after this season: 1) sign Collins to a long-term contract, 2) tag him as their franchise player for one year, for a salary of close to $15 million, or 3) let him go elsewhere, which they’ve already said they don’t plan to do. Remember, if the Browns “franchise” him next year, he still becomes a free agent after the 2017 season, $15 million richer.
A Pro Bowl linebacker of Collins’ immense talents could bring a multi-year contract of well over $12 million a year.
Poor Jamie Collins?
Collins, just turned 27 and entering the prime of his career, is already in Cleveland, preparing for this week’s game with Dallas. Cook said he called Collins Monday expecting to have to console him.
“Jamie didn’t need any consoling,” Cook said. “He said, ‘I’m fine. This is my job. I play football and if they didn’t want to pay me, I didn’t want to be there. I’m a grown man. I’m going to do my job.”
He is about to get paid a lot, lot more for doing it.
Rick Cleveland is Mississippi Today’s sports columnist. Read his previous columns and his Sports Daily blog. Reach Rick at rcleveland@mississippitoday.org.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.