Is Drew Stadium Next Up?

If there ever is a new stadium in Boston, it should be known as the House That Drew Built. The Patriots and owner Bob Kraft will need a new one to pay him.

Kraft made Bledsoe the highest-paid player in the history of the National Football League Thursday. The good thing is Bledsoe doesn’t think he should be the highest paid. The bad thing is the deal could come back to bite the Patriots.

Bledsoe will draw $42 million over the next seven years. His up-front bonus is $11.5 million. It’s insane for a kid who has played only two years in the league to be getting this kind of money, but it is all about gambling for the future. Gambling Drew will continue to grow the way he did a year ago. Gambling the Patriots will stay hot with the fans of New England. But most of all, gambling that a new stadium will be built.

The salary cap in the NFL this year is slated to be $37.1 million. Bledsoe’s new deal will count $3.9 million against that total. But here comes the scary part, a real lost-in-space odyssey. In the year 2001, Bledsoe will count $9.6 million on the cap.

In the inaugural year of the cap, 1994, it was set at $34.6 million per team. This year, with Charlotte and Jacksonville coming in as expansion teams and both Los Angeles teams moving into better financial deals, the cap moved $2.5 million to $37.1 million.

But, even if it continued to move at that pace and got near $50 million per team by 2001, one man, Drew Bledsoe, would be making 20 percent of the entire player payroll. This is dangerous. Sure, the No. 1 need of any team, beyond a great coach, is a top quarterback. Bledsoe, at this point, looks as though he will be the best in the business at that time. Still, no one knows what will happen after the current collective bargaining agreement ends in 1999.

In reality, the Patriots and Kraft are taking advantage of the window, a natural loophole in the present labor deal. The really big money in the Bledsoe deal will be paid out beyond 1998.

It is anticipated the next labor deal will grandfather in whatever has been done prior to it. No one knows for sure what the limits would be. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and player association director Gene Upshaw have started preliminary negotiations toward a new deal, trying to gain labor peace, which would maximize money the league and players would get from the next network television deal. The networks are inclined to give bigger dollars when they are insured by no-strike clauses, like the ones in the present deal. The Krafts once again are putting themselves on the financial edge, and are being haunted by the ghost of former owner James B. Orthwein.

Before Orthwein sold the team to Kraft he signed Bledsoe to his first NFL contract and let himself get snookered by Leigh Steinberg, Bledsoe’s agent. Steinberg did the first “voidable” contract in league history with the Pats, and every agent in the league has been laughing since.

Bledsoe signed a six-year deal two years ago. It had an escape clause at the end of three years if Drew played up to certain standards. Drew was going beyond the standards. In order to keep him, and peace in the organization Kraft had to try to keep Bledsoe happy on a new contract for a long time or risk the fans’ wrath.

Orthwein should never have gone for the voidable years. Orthwein kept the lowest payroll in the league so he could leave town with a lot of money. In order for this to make sense for the Krafts, they must get a new stadium and Bledsoe must stay healthy.

For Bledsoe’s old contract to be voidable at the end of the 1995, he had to start 10 games. If he did not sign the new deal, and was looking to escape, Parcells would have benched him to save one of the franchise’s most important assets.

Thankfully, it will not get to that.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: MONEY MEN The three highest-paid players in the NFL, based on average salary per season: Drew Bledsoe (Patriots) $6 million Troy Aikman (Cowboys) $5.8 Steve Young (49ers) $5