Earl Thomas gave the Seahawks way more than they deserved

Earl Thomas broke his leg on Sunday, which means the Seahawks won the contract standoff against their legendary safety.

So yippee for them, I guess.

The ghoulish thing is that in the analysis of the Thomas and Le’Veon Bell holdouts (or I guess “hold in,” in Thomas’ case) there has been a gross subtext bordering on “they deserve this,” meaning the injury and the ostracizing, respectively. It’s easy to find stories that describe the players as holding their teams “hostage.” At halftime of Sunday Night Football, Tony Dungy and Rodney Harrison took turns chastising Thomas, the potential Hall of Fame safety whose career may now be over.

Imagine that, watching one of the NFL’s best players break his leg, lose millions, and perhaps play the last snaps of professional football he will ever play, and giving a spit about how he conducted himself while sitting on a medical cart wearing an air cast. Or worse, daring to suggest that Thomas was half-assing it on the field, as Dungy did:

I love Earl Thomas as a player and as a person, too. But it’s clear because of his contract situation, he didn’t want to be there. We were all over Vontae Davis in Buffalo when he quit at halftime, but if you don’t want to be there, you shouldn’t play.

Nothing Thomas has said or done this season suggests he “didn’t want to be there.” In four appearances this season, he was exceptional. He had three interceptions and four passes defended, and had been grading out as the best defender in the league by Pro Football Focus prior to Sunday’s game. He picked off two passes against the Cowboys, the second of which sealed the win for the Seahawks and gave him every right to bow towards the Cowboys, who had flirted with trading for him.

That can’t be said enough: Yes, Thomas voluntarily sat out practice, but unlike Bell, Thomas did play, and he didn’t shirk contact. With 13 tackles, he was within his normal hit rate. He subjected himself to potential pile ups, awkward falls, and, worst of all, the dreaded non-contact injury like the one he evidently suffered Sunday while breaking to defend a pass in the end zone.

Thomas played because, just like every other player in the NFL, he feels obligated to. It’s really hard to be in the NFL if a player doesn’t buy into the sport — the love for it, the work, the belief that you are part of something larger than yourself. Football is a sport in which “commitment” gets dissected a lot, and before the season Thomas wrote a letter for the Players’ Tribune explaining that his decision to hold out was due in part to the way his contract might affect his ability to commit to each play.

If you’re risking your body to deliver all of this value to an organization, then you deserve some sort of assurance that the organization will take care of you if you get hurt. It’s that simple. This isn’t new, and this isn’t complicated. It’s the reason I’m holding out — I want to be able to give my everything, on every play, without any doubt in my mind.

Thomas played knowing he wasn’t being compensated at his actual value, and that one bad step could ensure that he never will. He didn’t appear to doubt himself at all, despite what Dungy might think, and the fact he did get hurt should be reason enough to forgive him for flipping the bird toward the Seahawks’ sideline, as offended as Harrison might be. Thomas’ teammates didn’t seem to mind the gesture.

Thomas probably played in part for them, too. As Bell’s situation has shown, even your coworkers — who deal with the same bosses, and under the same disproportionately weighted system — won’t necessarily be sympathetic to your cause if you decide to pick a fight with management. They, too, believe there is something noble enough about their profession that they’re willing to sacrifice their worth to help the team.

Thomas put his whole self on the line. He wasn’t “holding in” during games. And Bell is sitting out because he know he can’t hold back, either — that he’s most effective when he can put himself in complete subservience to winning football games. Those players’ total commitment to football is what made them so valuable in the first place.

SB Nation’s Natalie Weiner summed up the problem well last week.

Succeeding on this path is presented as a question of toughness and grit and loyalty and other, similarly character-defining adjectives. On a team of 53 men, there’s an assumption that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That players need to sacrifice to win, to give the game everything they have or get off the field.

The players have to be the ones responsible for keeping a bigger picture in mind, while teams are allowed to see players as individuals. The Seahawks, as head coach Pete Carroll put it, had “the business side and the ball side” to consider in regards to Thomas, and clearly sided with the former as they squeezed all the productivity they could out of their safety before likely parting ways.

If an NFL player’s job is to believe utterly in something bigger than him, then NFL teams operate under the opposite parameters, that nothing should be bigger than them. And that’s fine, I guess — this is all codified in a collectively bargained agreement that outlines things like a salary cap, minimum draft entry requirements, salary maximums, and non-guaranteed contracts.

We should bear in mind where that balance of power lies, however. Thomas gave Seattle much more than he was given, and Seattle can now get rid of Thomas at the exact moment it got everything it wanted out of him.

So once again, congrats Seahawks. Way to go. Your all-everything safety wanted to be on the field, and you were able to use that against him. And somehow people thought he was taking you hostage.

Huzzah.