Report: At least two teams will make offers for Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski

All right, we have some Rob Gronkowski news for you. Promise you won’t get mad?

Whether Gronk is on the trade block or not, there’s going to be teams trying to deal for him.

As in, “teamS”, plural.

That’s according to SI’s Albert Breer, who’s updating us by quote-tweeting his own article from last week where he floated the idea that it’d at least be worth a phone call to the Patriots to see what the asking price for Gronk was. Sounds crazy, but hey, if 49ers GM John Lynch has the stones to ask Bill Belichick if Tom Brady’s on the table, then hey, shooters gotta shoot, right?

Here’s Breer’s update from just after lunch on Tuesday afternoon:

Obviously, that’s pretty carefully worded; nobody’s made an offer for Gronkowski yet, that Breer knows of, but at least a couple teams are planning on putting an offer together and sending it over to see if New England will at least play ball.

Smart, really. The worst that can happen is New England says GTFO, and given all the rumors and uncertainty flying around about what Gronkowski may or may not want to do, may or may not want in terms of money, and may or may not be tired of in New England, if you’re a team that doesn’t have a game-changer at tight end...actually, scratch that, you could seriously drop Rob Gronkowski on to any of the 31 other teams in the NFL and he’d instantly take your offense to a plane of existence you never dreamed existed outside of Madden.

(OK, fine, here’s the mandatory “as long as he’s healthy”, you heathens)

And just eyeballing the salary cap aspect of it, Gronk’s on the books for a $10.9 million cap hit this year, and I’ll leave the heavy lifting when it comes to what happens if Gronkowski gets traded to the man, the myth, the legend, Miguel from PatsCap:

Yikes, that $4 million dead cap hit if they trade Gronk before the summer...ouch.

Not to pile it on, but we’ve also seen Belichick take what a lot of people think of as less than market value for players he knew he was going to either trade or lose anyway, like in the Jamie Collins, Jimmy Garoppolo, and Logan Mankins deals. Depending on what his position with Gronk is - and let’s be clear, aside from a couple reports of “friction”, we don’t know - this could set up a seller’s market for Belichick, or if Rob really is on the fence, it could be the opposite where it turns into a “get what you can” type negotiation.

Or all of this could be nothing at all, and Gronk shows up to training camp same as he always does, like Ian Rapoport is saying he will.

Which, to be sure, is how most of New England would like it.