PHOENIX — Chad Johnson is praying for a trade to the New England Patriots.
The Cincinnati Bengals disenchanted receiver — or as much as I hate to say this because I truly like the guy, more and more an ingrate — appeared at the Super Bowl media headquarters in downtown Phoenix Saturday and when a Boston reporter walked up, he gushed:
“I’m going to be playing for your team next year.”
When that drew a chuckle, he put his hands together like was praying and looked up to the heavens.
“It would be fun. I’d love to play there,” he told reporters. “But right now I’m in Cincinnati. That’s where I am.”
Johnson kept up his drumbeat to get out of Cincinnati when he appeared on the Jim Rome show, Saturday, and said he didn’t feel everyone in the the Bengals organization embraced him.
Pushed later for specifics, he refused comment.
In April 2006, Johnson signed a contract extension that would keep him a Bengal through 2011. He’s due a $3 million in salary in 2008 and has an additional $550,000 in incentives. The base salaries the three years after that are $4.5 million, $5 million and $6 million that final year.
People say Johnson’s outbursts here at the Super Bowl are being orchestrated by his master-of-manipulating-the-scene agent Drew Rosenhaus and while that is probably true, Johnson doesn’t deserve a pass on this.
He’s a grown man and — business posturing aside — he’s responsible for his actions. Painting the Bengals with a sour brush every time he’s around the national media lacks class.
Yet, if he becomes too much of a distraction for the team his ploy may work.
The baggage-heavy Randy Moss came to the Patriots after two moribund years in Oakland, in part because he accepted a reduced salary — one year for $3 million plus an additional $ 2 million in incentives.
He dropped the ego — the way so many troubled stars have done in order to fit into the my-way-or-the-highway system of Pats coach Bill Belichick — and then caught everything that came his way. He had an NFL-record 23 touchdown catches on the season.
Moss is a free agent at the end of the season and has said he wants to return, but if he does not the Pats would be looking for a big-time set of hands.
For Johnson to fit into the Pats program, he would have do jettison the current screw-the-team attitude. Of course that’s just what Corey Dillon did and he became a Pats stalwart with a Super Bowl ring.
Johnson has been in regular contact with former Bengals receiver Kelley Washington, who was dropped by the club after last season, picked up by New England and has become the star of the Pats special teams.
Earlier in Super Bowl week, Washington said he’d heard from several of his old teammates. He said they all told him” how great it was for me and how they wish they were here playing, too.”
Now Johnson is trying to turn wishful thinking into reality.
