Could Raye's playbook be holdup for Crabtree contract?

Is Jimmy Raye’s playbook between Michael Crabtree and the San Francisco 49ers as the franchise sets to begin the season today without the first-round draft pick?

The Niners open up this afternoon at Arizona and the 10th overall pick has yet to reach terms on a contract, the only remaining unsigned player from the draft. San Francisco is expected to hit the Cardinals with a big dose of running back Frank Gore, and then a little more Gore.

APMichael Crabtree probably knows wide receivers rarely produce big numbers in Jimmy Raye's offense.

Raye and coach Mike Singletary have talked ad nauseam about their goal to run the football 60 percent of the time (Baltimore led the league by rushing 55.95 percent of the time in 2008). When you take a closer look at the situation, it doesn’t look like Raye is full of a bunch of coach speak. This is what he really wants to do. Mike Sando produced a compelling chart on Thursday at ESPN.com that tracks the leading receivers in Raye-directed offenses. It’s worth a look. Raye has been a coordinator in 12 previous seasons for six organizations, and only twice has he had a wide receiver reach 1,000 yards, and only twice has he had a wide receiver have more than 64 receptions. To put that in perspective, 22 receivers topped 1,000 yards last season in the NFL, and 30 topped 64 receptions. They’re nice numbers but certainly nothing special.

What’s the point? Usually, negotiations for rookie contracts come down to more than the bonus money and the slotting, in this case between the ninth and 11th picks. The big holdups can be levels of escalators, thresholds of escalators, total value of escalators and possibly voidable years if the player really achieves. If that is the case with Crabtree and his negotiation between agent Eugene Parker and the 49ers, well, they have surely armed themselves with data from Raye’s past. Who wants to shape a contract around parameters in other deals when the offense is going to make it much more difficult to achieve the upside?

These contracts for wide receivers have multiple levels for escalators in them. The first level in a deal for one wide receiver drafted in the first round this year began at 55 receptions or 801 yards. That’s right near the averages for Raye’s offenses as Sando’s chart showed—55 receptions and 862 yards.

Parker negotiated the $60 million, six-year contract Larry Fitzgerald signed as the third overall pick in 2004. Fitzgerald hit all the escalators in his deal after four seasons, making his salaries worth nearly $32 million over the final two years of the contract. It forced the Cardinals to restructure his contract before 2008, netting him a $40 million, four-year contract with $30 million guaranteed. The unknown upside to the deal? Fitzgerald is set to become a free agent when he is 28, giving him another bite at the apple.

Why does this all matter to Crabtree? It would be very difficult to reach Fitzgerald-like levels of performance in Raye’s offense, and it will no doubt be even more difficult now that he’s missed all of training camp, all of the preseason and every bit of work that’s led up to the start of the season. It could be stalled negotiations are over these fine details that have significant impact on the earning potential of the player.

Stay tuned.

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