Rich Hofmann | Eagles lineman secure as he can be
IN UNCERTAIN NFL, ANDREWS GOES FOR SURE THING

As the Eagles prepared to announce the extension of guard Shawn Andrews' contract all the way through 2015, word filtered out to practice yesterday that Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger had been involved in a serious motorcycle accident.

One had nothing to do with the other, except by happenstance. Andrews and Roethlisberger are different people in different places living different lives. They are united only by their profession, and by the unpredictability of human existence.

You really do never know. Which is at least partly why Andrews signed a 7-year contract extension yesterday that a foxsports.com report valued at up to $40 million overall with about $10 million in bonus money, a value denied by none of the principals.

This is not about a motorcycle or bad judgment or the shaking of a franchise, as is happening in Pittsburgh as we speak.

Instead, on a day that shocked the NFL, this is about how each of us deals with uncertainty in his own way.

"Well, some guys feel like they can play out their deal and things happen," Andrews said. "But my rookie year, I had a very unfortunate accident [a fractured fibula in his first game], and you never know what tomorrow is going to hold. I have a daughter and my mom; I want that security and just to be here. I am an Eagle, and this is where I want to be. I haven't been to any other team, but I have heard stories from guys at other teams, and this is where I want to be."

It is that simple, but it isn't. Andrews, with 3 years remaining on his rookie contract, decided to give up a future look at free agency and sign a new deal now. He opted for certainty and security instead of a potentially bigger payoff in a couple of years.

As it is, he is in no danger of starving. His agent, Rich Moran, said, "This deal will set him up, the bonus alone, for life." But there is a trade-off, and it is real.

Eagles president Joe Banner, who has done a bunch of these kinds of deals over the years, said the process began weeks ago. There was a complication, though: The NFL's new collective bargaining agreement, combined with the coming explosion in television money, will have a significant effect on salaries in coming years. How do you work out a deal in such an uncertain time, a deal that one side or the other wouldn't hate the moment the ink dried on Andrews' signature?

"We decided to wait until later in the spring until we had a better feel for the market," Banner said. "But once we sat down and concentrated on getting something done, and felt like we had an updated value to use based on some new deals and the new CBA, it was a pretty smooth process."

Still, it took hours involving Moran, Banner and club vice president of football administration Howie Roseman. Coach Andy Reid and general manager Tom Heckert were involved at the beginning, too.

"We sit down and have these periodic personnel meetings that relate to things with cap implications," Banner said. "We lay out a list of young players, and players whose contracts expire in the next couple of years, and we go through them and review what their value would be in the marketplace, when would the right time be to approach them, do we want to approach them, so on and so forth.

"Included in that discussion is how badly we think the player wants to be here. You don't want to go to somebody early and have them decide in a couple of years this isn't the right place for them... We get into all of that and then decide who we're going to pursue."

The Eagles have been very successful over the years with this strategy. They identify young talent, offer some security, and hope they're right. They probably don't love every deal they've made - a couple come to mind, including John Welbourn, Todd Pinkston and some others - but they are hitting on a very high percent overall.

In a sport in which the contracts are not guaranteed and the players really do tend to be pretty insecure because of the threat of injury, the calculation about what to do is much more complicated than in the other sports. Andrews' rookie injury clearly factored in here.

"Part of it was his injury... it was a significant injury," said Moran, the agent.

Earlier, he said: "Each person's different as far as making that choice."

Security or potential? It is sports' eternal question. The nature of the business is so uncertain, so much about hope and luck and righteous bounces. There is no predicting, not with any certainty. Success is so often defined by the educated guess, and you get used to not really knowing.

But then there are those days when events can still shock you, when you wonder more than others. Days like yesterday.