All apologies for making this Lance Briggs day at Hogs Haven but I've been provided a forum for my opinions and feel like utilizing that resource.
Briggs and Superagent Drew Rosenhaus explicitly stated their plan for the '07 season should the Bears fail to unfranchise tag him:
Drew Rosenhaus, Briggs' agent, said Monday at the NFL owners meetings that his client will line up for the Bears next season -- but only on a limited basis if the team refuses to remove the franchise tag it put on the linebacker. Rosenhaus said Briggs would sit out the first 10 games, then return for the final six to accrue a played season under league rules.
And I'll side with Bears President Tim Phillips on this one:
The maneuver apparently is an attempt to avoid sitting out the season for no pay and allowing the Bears to have the right to use the franchise tag on Briggs for two more seasons.
''That is the plan, come back and play the last six games of the season,'' Rosenhaus said.
''We don't have anything to say,'' team president Ted Phillips said Monday. ''We franchised him. He's going to make a lot of money. We think he's a good player, and we want him on our team. It's as simple as that from our standpoint.''
Nothing about Lance Briggs tells me that he's the kind of guy I want on my team. Either it was him essentially saying that 7+M for one year's worth of work wasn't a fair price or else vowing only to show up at the end of the season (to mitigate his injury risks, a dubious suggestion as the article points out; doesn't missing offseason workouts and training camps put him at a significantly higher risk of injury if/when he does return with his then-untested body to the field... in November?), but something tipped me off that this just isn't a guy I want representing my franchise.
My own thoughts on this subject, if they weren't made clear enough by my recent posts, were perhaps put best by Mugatu in the Cinematic Masterpiece Zoolander:
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!