GM Nuk?
DeAndre Hopkins spent portions of the offseason negotiating his own contract extension that eventually came in adding two years and $54.5 million, keeping him in Arizona for the next five seasons.
Hopkins said the inkling to negotiate his own contract "90 percent" himself, stemmed from a desire to run an operation once his playing career ends.
"It's ownership and me believing in myself and my abilities to study the terminology of contracts and me knowing where I want to be after football," Hopkins said Tuesday, via the Arizona Republic. "I know one day I want to be a part of an organization and help build it, so I feel like this was a good time to learn and study everything that hopefully, I'll one day be doing.
"I think also just showing other players that you can get things done yourself if you believe in yourself and have the right team around you. Agents are great. There's never no knock on the agent or nothing against the agent that I had previously. There was no bad ties with them. It was just something that I wanted to do myself."
Hopkins isn't the first player to negotiate his own contract. New teammate Larry Fitzgerald has done it himself; Russell Okung, Richard Sherman, Bobby Wagner, Laremy Tunsil, to name a few, have also done their deals.
Nuk noted that negotiating his own deal stemmed from a desire to learn the process so that one day he'll know what it's like from the other side of the table.
"There was a lot of reading, a lot of nights staying up late learning the language and terminology of everything," he said. "My advisers, my team that I had, those guys are with me and have been with me for years now. They're not just advisers, but also family and mentors to me.
"It's a small group of people but we knew this is what we wanted to do going forward and we made it happen."
While most general managers have come from the scouting side of the football operation, there is a strong history of players taking control and helping turn teams around. Today names like John Elway and John Lynch jump out. On the other end of the operation, the Washington Football Team recently added former NFL veteran Jason Wright to run the business side of the building.
At 28 years old, Hopkins won't be retiring anytime soon. But when he does, he could be primed to take over a team. He's got at least five more years in Arizona to pick Steve Keim's brain on the job.
