Playing the market

In Cleveland, the veteran cynic is already trying to figure out how the Browns will screw this up. But every other God-fearin', Bernie Kosar-worshippin' Dawg Pounder is lining up for a No. 13 jersey, because hope springs eternal even in the stoniest of ground.

Yes, that's right, America. The Browns finally proved they were smarter than somebody in the National Football League, even if that somebody was the not-exactly-rocket-scientists New York Giants.

They traded one of the premier talents in the league, Odell Beckham Jr., to the Browns because, essentially, he was a tantrum-throwing diva, apparently unaware that supreme wide receivers in general tend to be tantrum-throwing divas to one degree or another. The Browns were happy to take him, of course, because now they've got Jarvis Landry on one side and Odell on the other, and the best of 2018's rookie crop of quarterbacks, Baker Mayfield, to throw to them.

They've also got breakout workhorse Nick Chubb at running back, and, after he no doubt serves a well-earned suspension, they'll have Kareem Hunt, a standout in Kansas City until he decided to kick a woman while she was lying on the ground. This makes him an exceptionally unsavory, if gifted, addition. It also makes him part of the current zeitgeist in the NFL, where a guy protesting racial injustice finds every door closed, but wife/girlfriend/random women beaters almost always manage to land a second act.

In any case, it's delirium time in Cleveland. And it's time to consider how well the players have learned to navigate market forces.

Beckham, for instance, will get a chunky new deal with a team of rising stars, leaving behind a team of ... well, not rising stars. His counterpart, Antonio Brown, another of those diva receivers, worked the system even better; the Raiders made him the highest-paid wide receiver in football with a three-year deal worth $50 million -- $30 million of which is guaranteed.

It was the payoff of a ruthless and crafty strategy in which Brown used social media to telegraph his disgruntlement with the Steelers, highlighting what he characterized as a broken relationship with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. The Steelers finally got tired of his act and dealt him -- even though he's a seven-time Pro Bowler, and even though they'd just signed him to a contract extension in 2017. Which means all they got in return was a third-round pick, a fifth-round pick and $21 million in dead money.

Brown, meanwhile, scored an historic raise.

That, boys and girls, is a good old country fleecin'.

And, yes, it's true, Brown's tactics did him no credit. And maybe that will hurt him in the long term; sooner or later, his rep as a certifiable pain in the ass will outweigh his value as a player. But in the short term?

Played the Steelers and the system like a Stradivarius, he did. He figured being a generational talent would trump his being a me-first jackass, even in an NFL that increasingly values "we" over "me" and character over physical ability. It was a calculated risk -- but exactly the sort of hardball the owners used to play in a day when they had all the power and the players had none.

You can debate if that was a better system than what we have now. But you can't debate who won this round.

Players 2, Owners 0.