Josh Norman received the blockbuster deal he was looking for with a five-year contract from Washington, but if it was up to the All-Pro cornerback, he would've never left the Carolina Panthers. He wanted to stay so badly, that he made a last-ditch effort to sign the franchise tag and even offered to play on a one-year, "prove it" deal.
Josh Norman tried to sign franchise tag and stay with Panthers at the last minute
Norman would’ve accepted a lesser deal to stick with the Panthers, but was told his window with the team closed.
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“My agent called them up and said if they wanted to do something, like a one-year, market-value [deal],” Norman told ESPN’s Dave Newton on Monday. “We wanted to come back. They said they weren’t willing to, so we had to do what we had to do.”
Instead, the Panthers rescinded the franchise tag applied to Norman earlier in the offseason, allowing the 28-year-old to become an unrestricted free agent. He didn’t last long on the market, signing a five-year, $75 million deal with Washington just two days later.
The deal pays Norman an average of $15 million per year with $50 million guaranteed, but he told Newton he would’ve signed the $13.952 million franchise tag if he knew it was his only hope at staying in Carolina.
“If I would have known, we could have come to some kind of agreement to where, all right, if this is the case, let me get this out of the way and we can work on something different,” Norman said. “I didn’t know all that went down like it did. If would have known that, of course I would have liked to have stayed there. Why would I want to leave there? But he tied my hands in the whole process.”
Norman claims that Panthers general manager Dave Gettleman blamed the cornerback’s former agent, Michael George, for forcing the split and told Norman, “Your agent is a reflection of you.” Norman hired a new agent, Ryan Williams, but the addition came too late to open negotiations with the Panthers.
“When we decided to place the franchise tag on Josh, we were fine with him signing it and then working on a long-term deal,” Gettleman said on Thursday at a press conference. “As we got deeper in conversations, we realized there was a significant difference in our thoughts and theirs. The intervening weeks gave us additional time to evaluate where we are going as a franchise. With the realization that a deal was not going to get done, our internal conversations kept leading us to the fact that the one-year deal was becoming less and less attractive.”
One motivation for the Panthers is that the contract signed with Washington essentially guarantees that Carolina will receive a compensatory third-round selection in the 2017 NFL Draft. The move also cleared cap space for a team that didn’t have much to work with.
But for Norman it means he has to go somewhere else to ... change his underwear?
“What would it be like if you heard the news you spent all these years [with one team] and overnight you have to change your underwear somewhere else?” Norman said, via ESPN. “I’ve still got love for Carolina. But I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.”
Norman was a fifth-round pick of the Panthers in the 2012 NFL Draft and played in 53 games over four seasons. He earned Pro Bowl and All-Pro honors for the first time in 2015, finishing with four interceptions, three forced fumbles and 18 passes defended.
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