Babb: Chiefs sign QB Cassel to multi-year deal

[Tribal Warfare]

Chiefs sign QB Cassel to multi-year deal
By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star

The decision has been made, the contract is signed, and the Chiefs have their potential franchise quarterback locked up for the long haul.

Kansas City signed Matt Cassel, a 27-year-old passer with a mountain of expectations ahead and a grain of experience behind him, to a multi-year contract that makes him the team’s face well into the next decade.

“I am honored and humbled,” Cassel said, “by the faith that the Chiefs organization has displayed in me.”

Faith is what the Chiefs appear to have plenty of in their new quarterback and how he’ll handle shouldering the praise and the criticism of a team deprived of recent success and a fan base starved for progress. Before taking over for Tom Brady in the New England Patriots’ first game of 2008, Cassel hadn’t started a game since 1999, his senior season at California’s Chatsworth High School.

It had been a long time for the 6-foot-4 right-hander, sitting at the University of Southern California behind a pair of Heisman Trophy winners and, after being a seventh-round pick of the Patriots in 2005, behind two-time Super Bowl MVP Brady. Then Brady was injured, Cassel won 11 games, was traded in March to the Chiefs, and now he’s Kansas City’s man for a lot of years.

The Chiefs didn’t release contract terms in an announcement Tuesday, and Cassel’s agent, David Dunn, was out of his California-based office and didn’t return phone messages. The deal reportedly will keep Cassel in Kansas City through the 2014 season and is worth up to $63 million, including $28 million guaranteed.

“Since Matt arrived in Kansas City,” Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli said in a team-issued release, “he has embraced the team and the community. His work ethic, his ability and competitive presence is what we expect from our players.”

Cassel is about to learn a thing or two about expectations. He already was seen as an upgrade over several years of questionable Chiefs quarterbacks, but now he’s at the center of a high-stakes gamble that will influence the Chiefs’ immediate future and could define how Pioli is viewed as the team’s top decision-maker.

Pioli bypassed the option of allowing Cassel to play the 2009 season as an audition of sorts, fulfilling the one-year, $14.53 million contract he was due after New England made Cassel its franchise player before the trade. If Cassel couldn’t handle the pressure of shouldering the team’s load, it would have been an expensive but low-risk way to find out Cassel’s measure. Instead, the Chiefs are taking their chances on Cassel, and a man who has walked a similar path said Tuesday that Kansas City’s confidence in the young quarterback will pay dividends.

Rich Gannon is an NFL analyst now, but he was once a stifled quarterback, too, stuck on the Chiefs’ bench behind Elvis Grbac in the late 1990s. Gannon signed with Oakland after the 1998 season, later taking the Raiders to a Super Bowl and being named MVP in 2002. He said the Raiders’ faith, after dealing with the Chiefs’ uncertainty, gave him the confidence to become an elite passer.

“It wasn’t so much the money,” Gannon said. “It was more that it was finally my football team. I was able to stand up and speak out loud and take control of a team. That’s really critical. It has to be your team. You can’t have two guys going back and forth, and that’s what the Chiefs have had.

“That’s really what has held that team back.”

Gannon said he saw all he needed from Cassel last year when the youngster filled in for Brady, doing it with the poise of a longtime starter. Gannon said he wouldn’t have been surprised if Cassel had wilted under the pressure of being Brady’s fill-in on a team with yearly Super Bowl expectations, but Cassel just kept on rolling.

“You’re looking at a guy who’s young, who has proven just in one year of play that he is very capable,” Gannon said.

Gannon is among a long list of Chiefs passers who have fallen short of being Kansas City’s long-term answer at quarterback. Gannon hasn’t forgotten that former Chiefs coach Marty Schottenheimer passed over Gannon and elected to start Grbac after a long absence, at a time when, Gannon said Tuesday, Grbac “wasn’t prepared” for the responsibility. Other than a few temporary flashes along the way, Gannon said, the Chiefs haven’t possessed an elite, long-term quarterback since Len Dawson retired in 1975.

“Trent Green was probably the best chance that they had,” Gannon said.

Now, after so many years and so many failed experiments, the Chiefs have another chance to cash in on potential, same as Cassel already did when he signed that contract. Gannon admitted Tuesday that Pioli and the Chiefs are gambling, but Gannon said Kansas City made the right play.

“It’s smart,” he said. “You have to go out there and get your franchise quarterback. It might be premature to start calling Matt Cassel a franchise quarterback. But it’s one of the critical pieces of the puzzle.”