Sam Donnellon: Eagles' Sheldon Brown doesn't know what to expect in offseason

ON DAY 1 of the 2010 offseason, Sheldon Brown picked up where he left off in the beginning of the 2009 offseason.

Well, almost.

He almost asked for his contract to be renegotiated.

He almost said "or else."

"Well, I do know that coach likes everybody here in the offseason during the OTAs to build that chemistry and camaraderie," is what he did say when I asked him about being a good soldier this offseason. "I know that's important to him. And I can't let my teammates down, so I'm going to try and do what I'm supposed to do. But it's kind of like one of those situations where - if it's not mandatory - you feel like you're working overtime for minimum wage."

This was the two of us alone outside the locker room yesterday, before Brown went inside, signed a few forms, and refined his message to a much larger assemblage of media. A few hours after that, a headline posted on the Eagles' official Web site, read, "Brown expects to be back in 2010."

The article ended with this, quoted accurately from the scrum at his locker:

"This is the team that drafted me in 2002. This is the team that I gave all I have to. I'm under contract and I plan on being here and I don't see it any other way."

Now here he is about 30 minutes before that, when we were discussing Brian Dawkins' departure after last season. Dawkins wanted to stay, I suggested, even considered reneging on the Broncos' deal at the last moment when the Eagles were said to contact his agent at the 11th hour.

"Um, I kept in contact with him during that whole situation and I don't know where they got that information from," said Brown.

So, no attachment?

"Everybody has that," he said. "I'm pretty sure that Emmitt Smith had an emotional attachment when he left Dallas. I'm pretty sure that Edgerrin James had an emotional attachment to Indy when he went to Arizona.

"I think you might be making a little too much of it. It's my opinion, but sometimes business is business, man."

Here's the business: Brown, 30, will make $3.5 million again next season before his salary hikes in 2011 and 2012. Resiliently healthy again this year, his career-high five interceptions should have catapulted him into his first Pro Bowl, if anyone who picks that team was ever really watching. Instead, they chose Asante Samuel, who had more interceptions and surrendered more big plays, and is many things Brown is not - self-preserving, self-promoting, aloof from his teammates.

Brown was one of the last ones in the locker room yesterday because he spent about 20 minutes conversing with (and mostly listening to) practice-squad cornerback Geoffrey Pope. He is a leader, Brown is, a disciple of Dawkins, and last spring's icky departure of his mentor did not go unnoticed. Hence, the guarded approach at times yesterday, like when someone in the scrum asked him if there was "a trade demand in your future?"

"Obviously my agent will take care of that," Brown responded.

Asked in the locker room if his feelings were the same now as they were last offseason - when he publicly asked for a trade after his private request for a contract reworking was stiff-armed by team president Joe Banner - Sheldon said, "I don't really think talking to you does [anything] for me, so . . . "

Outside the locker room before that, Brown was more expansive, returning to last spring's theme, that the contract he signed in 2004 came before a new collective-bargaining agreement spiked salaries and left his, in his view, well below market value for a player of his achievements and consistency.

"This is my thing," he said. "The only reason I was saying it from Day 1 was that the numbers were the numbers, and they didn't lie. It's not like I missed a lot of time, or did a lot of crap, or was not a leader on the field. I've never been that way and I never will be that way. But the truth needed to be told and somebody had to tell it. Unfortunately, it had to be me."

The Eagles' position then is likely to be their position again this spring: that a deal's a deal, and that with his signing bonus factored in, Brown's was not an unfair one. But the final line of the authorless statement released then seemed unnecessarily hostile, even petty.

"Sheldon's comments under the circumstances actually serve to devalue him in a trade if we were willing to consider it, which we are not," their statement read.

The Eagles, of course, then

acquired Ellis Hobbs from New England, beginning a countdown to Brown's days as an Eagle. Meanwhile, Brown showed up, worked as hard as he always has, said very little and posted possibly his best season yet.

All of which may keep him in Eagles green for yet another season, and cost him a new deal somewhere else.

"I don't know what I expect," he said as we stood alone out in the hallway. "I really don't. For me the only thing I can control is going into the offseason, working out, preparing myself for another football season.

"Wherever it may be."

Send e-mail to

donnels@phillynews.com.

For recent columns, go to

http://go.philly.com/donnellon.