Benjamin Watson Quotes

The franchise tag, it's a one-year deal. I would like a little bit more stability.

Free agency screws everybody's allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It's really hard.

My decision leaving the Nuggets was based on the organization not saying they had the cap room to sign me.

I've seen where teams pay to get a player, like when Los Angeles paid to get Wayne Gretzky.

Pro basketball is a very mercenary endeavor.

When you go into free agency and have options, any team is up for you to be on - and the Raiders, obviously with me having been there for so long, have a great shot at it.

You see great players, Hall of Fame players that didn't stay with their team.

I've seen players in the past who wanted to stay with their team, and it didn't work out.

Football players value job security and stability as much anybody else.

I don't think it's right to think ahead to free agency.

There's very few guys that play for one team their whole careers, nowadays, especially in the cap era it's a lot tougher.

Just because you go to free agency doesn't mean you don't want to be somewhere. It's just a part of the business.

Six years at Ajax and eight years at Tottenham, that reflects the way I want to be as a footballer, I like stability and that is what Benfica offered me and that was very important for me.

I can't speak on anybody else's free agencies, how that's going, but for myself, it helps to kind of be patient and let it happen.

In the NFL, you have a short shelf life. As a running back, if you're the first pick, and you're NFL life expectancy is only 3.5-6 years, your first big contract might not come until three years in - well, you might never get there. They need to get those signing bonuses up front because nothing is guaranteed.

When I look at our roster, I'm sure all of you have printed that I'm coming up on 35, and given my situation and my salary structure and all that, yeah, I have to wonder if this team is going to make moves and they haven't.

I'd often wondered what would I do if I were ever traded, because it happened many, many times.

Today, free agency takes away a lot of your heroes, they go somewhere else. Some of them don't but a lot of them do-take the higher offer to go somewhere else. And, it turns the fans off because they get attached to the players.

We protected Andre Johnson, given him long-term contracts. Brian Cushing's got a long-term contract. Arian Foster. So certain key players, core players, we've tried not to tie them up for a long period of time.

I went out as a free agent in Boston and had a great year and I priced myself out of there market, at the time.

The ability of players to jump teams when their contracts are up has hurt fan loyalty.

And historically the owners have used loyalty to a team or a city to hold players as opposed to always paying their worth.

I have gone from a player who thought he would spend his whole career with one organization to a player who's been with three organizations in a week. It's like rotisserie baseball.

You always think you're one of those players who will be in one place the whole time, one of those guys they'll never let leave because you play hurt, do what it takes. But it's a different age. A lot of coaches, they like having younger guys.

Obviously, in the NBA, there's a lot of different decisions that people make. The whole thing in the NBA is that people sometimes have an opportunity to go where they want.