BlueTalon
Well-known member
I carried a lot of hate and anger toward Hutch for a long time. In one week, his story went from "I didn't know the poison pill clause was in there" to "I knew it was there" to "I asked for it to be there." People chided us for criticizing him by saying things like "It's a once-in-a-lifetime offer" -- but it was actually a twice-in-one-week offer, and Hutch just made it so one of those offers was problematic. I actually don't blame Ruskell for that one, because that type of poison pill was unprecedented. Had it not been there, we would have made the same offer, and he'd still have been a Seahawk.
People here lambasted Ruskell for cheaping out, wanting to pay transition tag prices rather than franchise tag prices. I think that was unfair criticism. The transition tag was offered to Hutch as a means of letting him set his market value, which it did. And even with the poison pill language, we could have matched the offer if the &^%$*$ Special Master hadn't determined that the "highest paid lineman" clause only referred to the date the contract was signed. Otherwise, Walt's restructured contract with a throwaway year would have allowed Hutch to be the highest paid lineman on the team, we'd have signed Hutch, and the rest would have been history.
I took some bitter solace at the time from the fact that Hutch went from a state without an income tax to a state with one. I looked it up, and at that time, MN tax on $49M would have been almost $4M. Suck it, Hutch.
Since then, my attitude has softened. The poison pill will always have been a shitty thing to do, but since it happened, we heard stuff about the locker room under Holmgren. I don't remember the specifics, but it seemed at least a little dysfunctional. And I don't blame someone for wanting out of that.
