Ricky Williams’s Awful NFL Contract Never Gave Him A Chance

[JonLP24]

Long article so I'll skip a lot

In 1999, running back Ricky Williams signed a rookie contract with the New Orleans Saints in a deal often called the worst for any player in NFL history. Williams, who was the fifth draft pick overall, agreed to a large signing bonus and a minimum salary. The total contract value — driven by ambitious performance incentives — was reported as being worth up to $68 million. As Williams put it at the time:

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One of the famous sections of Williams’s contract is the “Special Provisions,” a list of 26 incentives each worth $50,000 a season. Some of these incentives are pretty easy to reach, if you’re a competent NFL starter, but some have only been hit by the best running back seasons of all time, and a few are practically impossible.
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So which running back seasons would have actually made some money? The real answer is that it would have been a 52-way tie, as the contract details make a bad deal even worse by stipulating that no more than $500,000 can be paid out for a single season. Hitting 10 incentives would be the same as hitting 20. Williams maxed out just one time, hitting 10 incentives in 2002. He never hit more than six incentives in his three seasons in New Orleans and only hit one his rookie year.

Even if Williams had hit 10 incentives in each of his first seven seasons, he only would have taken home $3.5 million, less than half of his signing bonus. The real meat of his deal came through two heftier performance .

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The ‘Be As Good As Terrell Davis’ bonuses

The Ricky Williams contract is really a monument to the achievements of Terrell Davis, who accrued the above stats during the four seasons prior to Williams’ signing his deal.7 If Ricky could match three out of four of those marks during his first four combined seasons the value of his contract would increase immensely, and he’d earn as much as $39 million over his final three seasons (but more likely somewhere in the area of $15 million to $25 million.)8
He wasn’t even close. But few running backs have been:
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ricky-williams-awful-nfl-contract-never-gave-him-a-chance/

[Auggie]

1. I've always thought incentives in any kind of contract are dubious

So much can go wrong, manipulated or deliberately sabotaged.