Haynesworth: Bucs Would Have Given More Money

When Albert Haynesworth signed his seven-year, $100 million contract with the Redskins he immediately became the highest paid defensive player in the league.

But now he's told Sirius radio (as relayed by the Bucs Beat) that he could have actually earned a lot more if he was willing to become a Tampa Bay Buc. Instead, he wanted to go to Washington because he wanted to be part of a team in a big market--something that disqualified both the Titans and Bucs in his mind.

"They offered me a whole lot more, and even with their tax situation, it could have been 20 percent more. But you look at Washington, they've got a lot of the pieces together. They're right there. They're in a huge market. It's one of the largest markets in the world. You've just got a large, huge media outlet and it can be life beyond football. Going to Tampa, I mean, great city. Looking at it from the off-season standpoint, I love the water. I love to be out in the sun. It's just awesome, but it would've been like another Nashville. Tampa doesn't have that big market and they don't have a huge fan base like the Washington Redskins do, so I think it was just a choice just to look at it that way."

The Redskins do have arguably a larger fan base than the Bucs or Titans, but does it really help to lob a grenade at the fans of another team in the same conference?

But more notably, this is just a further reminder that either there was some tampering going on or the first hours of the free agent signing period was amazingly busy, as Haynesworth's agent managed to field a massive offer from the Redskins, take down the details of an even bigger offer from the Bucs (and work out the tax ramifications), decide to go back to the Redskins and work out the parameters of a deal and nail it down, all in the first couple of hours after teams could legally talk to free agents.