James Harrison Interested in Playing for Ravens, Saints
By Josh Hill
He James Harrison Wants to Play For Your Team tour continues, as Harrison’s pimp agent Bill Parise isn’t being shy about throwing his clients name against every wall in the NFL to drum up interest. Over the weekend, Parise came out and said that Harrison “would love” to play for the Browns and Patriots and it appears that the Ravens and Saints have been added to the list.
Basically, if you’re teams plays a sport where bashing skulls is part of the rules, Bill Parise is going to tell you that James Harrison is a great fit for your club.
You can’t blame Parise for using this tactic, since he is Harrison’s agent. But this can all be interpreted in two different ways and both are drastically different from one another. The first is that Parise is trying to drum up as much interest as possible in an effort to drive the price up on Harrison. Logically, if you convince four teams that your client wants to play there, a bidding war may ensue.
But another, more depressing way to interpret this is that Harrison hit the open market this weekend and has had zero calls come his way. Things are so bad that Parise is doing proverbial push ups int he driveway to get teams to offer Harrison a contract.
The fact of the matter is, Harrison’s on the wrong side of 30 by roughly five years and teams aren’t interested in jumping at an aging linebacker even if he’s got Harrison’s talent. Someone will offer him a deal down the line, but it’s apparent that he’s not the hot commodity some would like him to be. Ad for how he’d fit in with New Orleans or Baltimore, that’s a different story.
Rob Ryan is moving the Saints into a 3-4 set next season, and while Harrison thrived under that system in Pittsburgh, Junior Galette is apparently the guy the Saints want to move to outside linebacker and he’s got something Harrison doesn’t: a three-year deal with the Saints.
The Ravens are already aging on defense and they want to turn things over, not keep them the same. Harrison fits the bone crunching style of defense the Ravens run, but he’s old and the Ravens are aiming to get much, much younger as a unit.
In two days we’ve heard that Harrison would love to play for four different teams, so in the next 72 hours, expect everyone from the Oakland Raiders to Australian Rule Football teams to be mentioned by Bill Parise when it comes to where James Harrison is dying to play in 2013.