I've seen a lot of talking about Ìke Taylor and of course other DBs making big money this year. I got to thinking, DBs are really valuable. And as such I don't think they should get skimped on come pay day. This is in a way a case for paying Ike Taylor a lot of money, something I'm not opposed to.

So how much should a DB be worth. I figured lets look at another position to compare

I started thinking, how many Great DBs are there in the league?  And I mean the best. At Safety, Polamalu and Ed Reed come to mind. Bob Sanders isn't great anymore and only was for a couple years at best. How many other ones are truly game changers?

So you have 2 safeties. What about CBs? Asomugha and Revis are the two best ones. They can shut down a defensive side singlehandedly. We've seen other high quality corners get big deals recently, like Cromartie or Stanford Routt. They arguably aren't as good as Asomugha or Revis but they are very good corners. But not excellent like the first two.

So I count 4 excellent players as DBs and a few others that are very good but not wow.

Immediately my mind goes to the QB position as having similar numbers. As far as excellent QBs, we have Brady, Breesus, Fetushead manning, Roethlisberger. Some of the other ones behind them could be Flacco, Vick, McNabb, Rivers, etc..

So again I have 4 excellent QBs and several high quality ones below.

It makes sense to me in this case that a DB should have a nearly equal value to that of a QB. In terms of filling a position. Sure the QB does more, amanages a whole offense, and can make a big impact on a team. However on defense, a good DB can alter a game. Polamalu comes to mind. He's probably won a lot of games for us, I can think of several this season alone (buffalo, Ratbirds 2, Bengals 2).

And a good CB can make a defense like the Jets capable of stopping Tom Brady in a playoff game.

So IMO a good DB can be as important as a QB in several cases.

My point here is supply and demand determines a fair price for a player. Or a product, anything really. We have a high demand for franchise QBs and they are in short supply. So the price goes up and we see contracts over 17 million a year. Likewise now in the CB market we have many going for 12 million a year now.

I consider that a fair price. 12 million for an excellent CB. When we consider maybe 4 of them available and only a select few at CB and S, 12 million makes perfect sense.

How does this affect us? Well Ike Taylor is an excellent corner. I don't feel the need to make my whole case, but he has singlehandedly cockblocked #1 receiver after #1 receiver. Gave OchoCinco goose eggs in the stat sheet for like 4 years. He may not be as good as Revis or Asomugha in the INT column, but he's certainly better than Cromartie or Routt.

So I think a perfectly fair price is 10-11 million a year. Give him a contract for 3 years at that price.

Talk about low-balling him to 8 million or even 9 is rough. That's a pretty hard decline for his value. 1 million is probably the extent of a hometown discount when the payday is this big.

If the organization sees what I see, and knows this is fair value for a player, they'll make the deal. They don't overpay people. But there  is a difference between a high, well-appraised price, and a retarded overpriced FA that isn't that great. We pay big bucks to Polamalu, Ben, etc.. Ike deserves it too.