Keidel: When Time Comes, Will Giants Pay Big Bucks To Keep Beckham?

By Jason Keidel
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Now that Odell Beckham Jr. has conquered whatever plagued him since the Josh Norman game -- call it a phase, growing pains or professional puberty -- he's owned the bold ink and back page for all the right reasons.

Which means the Giants star's place on the NFL totem pole for wideouts has resumed, a full-throated debate that most agree centers on a wildly talented triumvirate -- Beckham, Atlanta's Julio Jones and Pittsburgh's Antonio Brown.

An avid case can be made for all three. As an admitted, unabashed Steelers homer, yours truly says Mr. Brown is the most complete and most productive. But if your argument is that Beckham is the most naturally gifted and has the highest ceiling, only a fool would have a serious problem with that. Still, we are talking almost microscopic nuance, no matter who owns the pole position.

Which means, of course, the Giants will have to make a serious business decision in the next year or two. With football being a meritocracy, the greatest players demand the greatest sums. Do you crack open the vault and pay Beckham the megabucks he will surely demand? Or do you show financial prudence, and look at the conga line of iconic wideouts who have never been the centerpiece on a Super Bowl football club?

MORE: Odell Beckham Jr.'s 5 Best TD Celebrations

Let's stretch the list of the best wide receivers to five -- Jones, Brown, Beckham, A.J. Green and Dez Bryant. What do they all have in common? Zero Super Bowl rings, combined.

According to spotrac.com, there are nine wide receivers in the top 50 NFL salaries, based on their respective salary cap hits. (Seventeen of the top 18 are quarterbacks, of course, with Eli Manning at No.1.)

1) Julio Jones (Atl), $15.9 million
2) Larry Fitzgerald (Arz), $15.8 million
3) Demaryius Thomas (Den), $15.2 million
4) A.J. Green (Cin), $13 million
5) Dez Bryant (Dal), $13 million
6) Jeremy Maclin (KC), $12.4 million
7) Vincent Jackson (TB), $12.2 million
8) Antonio Brown (Pit), $11.9 million
9) Alshon Jeffrey (Chi), $11.1 million

Only Thomas has a Super Bowl ring, and not based on his sublime 2013 season, but rather when he rode the backs of his supreme defensive players in 2015.

Beckham is easily as good as any of the aforementioned Pro Bowl players. Yet all of them will make more this year than Beckham will make over the life of his four-year, $10.4 million rookie deal (not including a fifth-year option). And you need not be a Big Blue devotee to realize he has outperformed his $2.6 million average annual salary. But there's the odd dynamic between fans and their favorite teams. The blue-collar stiff who belches half his salary for season tickets is instantly chafed when a football player holds out for an extra million or two but has no problem with their billionaire employers pocketing said cash.

How often do we hear about the pampered baller who has lost all sense of self and gratitude come contract time? Yet some middle-aged tycoon, who simply inherited an NFL team from his father, preening from his LearJet, owns the moral high ground?

Beckham is not set to become an unrestricted free agent until 2019. And the Giants, led by the Mara family, are like most old-school patriarchs, like the Rooney-owned Steelers, in that they don't tend to tear up contracts well before their expiration date. The Steelers made an exception with Brown, spiking his salary this season.

Sometimes talent supersedes tradition or corporate coda. Beckham is simply too good to make a NFL pauper's coin. The 300th-highest-paid player in the league, Cowboys defensive tackle Tyrone Crawford, literally makes double Beckham's wage.

Sure, the NFLPA is partly to blame. They got smoked at the bargaining table, on myriad levels. Perhaps the biggest folly is that the rookie wage scale would blast open the treasure chest for more deserving veteran players. There had to be a happy medium between JaMarcus Russell getting $60 million straight out of LSU and Beckham (also from LSU) getting a fraction a decade later.

If it's pure aesthetics or entertainment, there's no player that draws your eyes to the screen like Beckham, whose athletic splendor is hypnotic. But NFL teams tend to be built from the inside out, starting with the trenches and quarterback. It's easy to hop onto the cliche that a player is worth whatever a team is willing to pay. But history suggests that stratospheric contracts for stratospheric wideouts don't work out.

But perhaps Beckham is an exception. Or the exception. And someday soon the Giants will have to decide if he is.

Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel