I'll preface my statement below by saying that I appreciate Portis' contribution to the team. I have no doubt that when he's on the field he's giving it 100%. Now thats out of the way....

It's always been my thinking that RB is one of the easiest positions in football to effectively fill through the draft. Yes, Portis is an outstanding talent but I think we clearly over paid to get him and continued to do so when we extended him. Would the “drop off” from Portis to Betts have been worth that much to this team? I don't think so.

Clinton will be 28 by the start of the season and I'd say he isn't a young 28. He's had a ton of carries over the past few seasons. He's been hurt at times. He runs his mouth a bit too much. We have an awful lot of eggs in the Portis basket. That just doesn't seem football smart to me. How many productive seasons does he have left? At what cost will those seasons come to a team that has other holes to fill on offense, maybe QB, going forward?

I also think it's very unwise for an owner to get too chummy with players. I even thought it was a little funny when Dan got close to Darrel Green and Bruce Smith before they retired. Being plugged into the team is one thing, making the players think they run the show is another. Again, it's just not football smart.

Allow me to pull part of a post by Skin Patrol over at Hogs Haven (thanks for doing the number work for me brother) regarding Portis. I found the post while looking for Portis' contract numbers. He echoes my thoughts exactly and thus obviously a brilliant guy (or gal).

• The highest compensated player on the team through 2013, escalating dramatically in 2010 to over 10M a year.

• His release fees start at 13M in 2009 and go down about 2.5M-3M a year as additional guaranteed moneys are prorated out of his contract. Keep in mind this number is just as likely to increase as decrease, because the preferred solution for solving every Redskin salary cap problem is renegotiating formerly unguaranteed money into guaranteed money prorated over the course of the contract, thereby increasing the penalty for early release.

• Cursory examination shows that Portis is just above Chris Samuels and just below Chris Cooley in terms of release penalties over the next 3 years.

• Incredibly, the team is in the unenviable position of taking a 7 digit penalty for cutting Portis at any moment before 2013. I love Clinton Portis, he's one of my favorite players on the team. I am incapable, though, of defending our decision to tie so many funds into his contract necessarily. Fates change rapidly in the NFL and you're better off not marrying yourself to (virtually) any player for that much change. I think this is especially true of running backs, as the position is one of the more fungible ones in the game.

• Because he's set to cost the team an alarming 10+M in 2010, the team can actually save money by cutting him (with a penalty of around 8.5M) which would then give us the largest individual dead cap hit that I can recall seeing in Washington (for a nice comparison, we paid ~ 6M in total dead cap hit last year) though I could be wrong about that.