NFL Spin Zone
Fansided

Report: Demaryius Thomas, Denver Broncos not talking yet today

By Kevin Parvizi

facebooktwitterreddit

It’s hard to see the Denver Broncos and Demaryius Thomas agreeing to a new long-term contract today, because it appears both sides are just too far apart to come to a middle ground. As per Bleacher Report’s Jason Cole, the Broncos are set on sending a message to everyone about how they’ll deal with contracts in the future, and they “won’t budge” from their contract offer to Thomas that is worth “nearly” $13 million per season.

ALSO ON SPIN ZONE: Is Thomas A Top Five Receiver?

That’s not chump change, but it’s less than what Thomas would command on the open market with WR-needy teams bidding on him, and it’s over $3 million less than what he’s targeting, which is Calvin Johnson money (Megatron makes $16.2 million per year).

More from Denver Broncos

There isn’t much time for the Broncos and Thomas to come to terms to a deal, and it doesn’t sound like they’ve been hammering away at a deal. In fact, 9News’s Mike Klis reports that as of 9 a.m. M.T. (11 a.m. E.T.), there has been “no communication” between the Broncos organization and Thomas’s agent Todd France.

Klis added his own thoughts to his reported news by summing it up in the tweet below.

Yeah, this isn’t a good sign at all, but I don’t think anyone realistically expected both sides to come up with a deal. There’s still time on the clock, as the deadline to sign franchised players to long-term deals is 4 p.m. ET.

However, there isn’t much time left, and both sides seem very far apart, so the only elite receiver who seems in a position to gain a favorable long-term deal by leveraging himself against the organization is Dez Bryant, who benefits from the fact that the Dallas Cowboys need him more and don’t have a guy like Emmanuel Sanders as their No. 2 receiver (nothing against Terrance Williams, of course).

After all, it was the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport who tweeted earlier this morning that only a “significant turn” of events would cause a deal between Demaryius Thomas and the Denver Broncos to become a reality. Rapoport told us not to “rule out” the thought of Thomas holding out, as Bryant has threatened, but this holdout carries less weight due to the fact that the Broncos have Thomas, second-year pro Cody Latimer, and will have already passed the deadline to give Thomas a new deal.

It doesn’t look like Thomas is going to take a significant discount to stay with the Broncos for the long haul, and it doesn’t look like the Broncos are going to pay their star receiver market value. They probably have plenty of faith in their other players, though the jury is obviously still out on Latimer despite his upside in 2015 and beyond (when they’ll need him most).

Next: Is C.J. Anderson A Top Ten RB?

More from NFL Spin Zone

Home/Denver Broncos