Meriweather: Players Would Agree To Almost Anything In CBA If NFL Offered Guaranteed Contracts
BOSTON (CBS) -- Brandon Meriweather does not like cold weather.
The former safety for the Patriots, Bears, Redskins and Giants (all cold weather locales, coincidentally) was asked Wednesday on Toucher & Rich in which NFL cities he'd never want to play.
"I hated playing in Minnesota, Kansas City, Buffalo," Meriweather said. "[In Minnesota] I never played in weather better than negative-9 degrees. I played in the dome once, but getting to the dome was a problem, too. It was negative-9 degrees."
On top of the normal difficulties that come with trying to play tackle football in freezing cold weather, Fred Toucher brought up a less-publicized but still very important issue: "It also can cause shrinkage."
Meriweather shed some fascinating light on the topic.
"I don't know, man. I don't have them problems," he said.
Following a brief back-and-forth about some new societal issues in Donald Trump's America, the conversation was steered toward Thursday Night Football. The league's expansion of the Thursday night package to last throughout the whole season has not been a successful venture. The games are typically not crisp, and the fact that every team has to play a Thursday game leads to some very undesirable matchups.
Meriweather himself said he mentally didn't mind playing the Thursday games, but physically, it was a struggle. Considering players are basically forced to play these games, Meriweather was asked if as a player he ever felt frustrated by the NFLPA getting forced to bend to the NFL's will.
"Hell yes. Everybody, every player I could think of gets mad at the NFLPA, because we feel like they took any kind of deal," Meriweather said. "So of course -- everybody's mad at them."
To Meriweather, the players' desires are really quite simple: Give the players guaranteed contracts, and the rest of the CBA is just made up of details.
"First off, I would've made all the money guaranteed," Meriweather said. "It ain't no, 'OK, you got five [years] for $50 [million], and you only get $25 [million].' No, you're going to get five for $50 [million]. So that's first off. It's easy, I think, because if you could get the money aspect right, the players would pretty much go for any damn thing after that. If you're gonna say, 'OK, we're going to do y'all just like baseball and basketball, all contracts are guaranteed regardless,' man, you could play six games a week and we wouldn't give a damn. But the problem is our money is not guaranteed. You could sign five for $50 [million] and get cut after a year and you only made $10 [million]. So that's the biggest thing that I think we see now, is the money aspect."
Listen below, as the guys also ran through Five Questions With Brandon Meriweather:
