Fuck Deion Branch

Great player? Sure.
Want him on the Pats? Yeah.

But fuck anyone who, as Ron Borges of the Globe noted today, feels that the Patriots' offer of three years for $19 million "undervalued him enough to compel him to accept a $14,000-a-day fine for withholding his services despite having a year remaining on a five-year-old rookie contract that was due to pay him $1,045,000."

I'm a realist -- I know that pro athletes and other entertainers make a crazy amount of money and it is way out of proportion to that of, say, most of the people who scrape together enough money to buy a ticket to watch them.

But there is so much wrong with that sentence starting with

a) feeling undervalued at $19 million over three years. Take a random sample of Pats' fans at any given game and see who would turn down $19 million over three years to play football.

b) feeling so insulted that you'd take a $14,000 a day fine not to suffer under such an undignified contract and

c) being already under contract at more than $1 million annually, which has got to be at least 10 to 20 times the average salary of most Patriots fans.

Borges goes on to dig this ditch deeper with this gem about Deion's current contract: "Even that figure is skewed, however, because nearly half of it ($500,000) was a result of Branch hitting certain incentives last season, when he had a career-best 998 receiving yards to lead the team."

Oh my, how horrible that you would actually be required to perform well to earn $1 million! Now I REALLY understand why Deion Branch is holding out rather than, say, honoring his current contract.

I guess I'll just never understand why fans, who are stuck with increasingly high ticket prices to watch pro sports, have even the tiniest shred of simpathy for most of these athletes during their contract negotiations.