It was late Monday night, and Daniel Jones’s agents, Brian Murphy and Camron Hahn, were cashed from a day that started with a flight from Indianapolis to New Jersey, was spent mostly on the first floor of the Giants’ practice facility and didn’t engender a ton of optimism that a blockbuster contract was on the horizon. So in that delirium, as they tried to construct one last proposal to swing the momentum, a weird idea arose.
Hahn bet he could draw a better one than Murphy. Murphy’s resembled a fish with legs. Hahn’s was marginally better—a curly tail actually made it distinguishable as a pig, which was enough to win the impromptu competition. And in the end, their hope was what was underneath, the so-called Lipstick on a Pig proposal, would be enough to win the day Tuesday and help get the Giants and Jones to the endgame everyone was looking for.
The truth is, as they’d find out the next morning, after an ill-fated Uber ride into Manhattan led to a short-circuited night of sleep, it wasn’t. But the moment, the unsatisfactory result of it and the fortitude on the part of everyone to fight through it actually was indicative of how the whole scramble to get the Giants and Jones to renew vows went, four years after New York took the Duke star No. 6 in the draft.
Some 16 hours after the Giants got a look at Murphy’s and Hahn’s artwork, Jones agreed to a four-year, $160 million extension that could wind up worth as much as $195 million. It happened despite an 11th-hour agent change, an initial set of meetings that careened right into a dead end, another set in Indianapolis that were up and down, and a bad start to talks at the wire.
That, though, was because from the start, there was very little posturing or pulling punches. Mostly because, in this particular negotiation, there was no time for that.
“That’s the only way this deal worked, is both sides were willing to roll up their sleeves and forget about traditional negotiating tactics, not worry about who’s calling who or whose turn it is to give a proposal, and just work our asses off,” says Murphy, the president of Athletes First. “Because this was the best result for everybody. It was just really good. I was proud of the transparency throughout the process, we were very up front and open with [Giants GM] Joe [Schoen] and his whole team, and they were with us.
“No one hid the fact that we wanted to get this done. It’s the right result, 100 percent.”
And just as the negotiation was unusual, the story behind it was, too.
