On Monday afternoon the deadline for teams to reach long-term agreements with their franchise players forced teams to make last second negotiations to avoid having their star players on one-year deals. The result was brand new contracts for a few players, including two running backs.
Ravens running back Ray Rice, a player consistently compared to Maurice Jones-Drew, and Bears running back Matt Forte, who shares the same agent as Jones-Drew, each got the long-term deal they've long pursued. Even Jaguars kicker Josh Scobee got in on the Monday pay day. But not Jones-Drew.
As Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports said, there's little doubt that Jones-Drew suffered from a bad "case of the Mondays:"
Let's consider the perspective of another terrific halfback, the Jaguars' Maurice Jones-Drew, who undoubtedly came down with a severe case of the Mondays. The NFL's leading rusher in 2011 was already unhappy with his contract; now two more backs are ahead of him on the salary charts, and the Jags just coughed up cash for a teammate who, if he so chooses, can devote much of his workday to online shopping.
The new contracts, though, don't do much to help Jones-Drew's cause. Like Silver says in the article, there are a list of reasons why the Jaguars should be content to sit on the contract of their star running back for now and wait to see if it's an issue worth taking on during the 2013 offseason.
For more on the Jacksonville Jaguars visit SB Nation's Jaguars blog Big Cat Country.