Seahawks All Pro safety Kam Chancellor continued his holdout Monday morning on Seattle's ninth day of training camp, and there remains no end in sight to the standoff.
It's a game of chicken for Chancellor, who stands to lose a big chunk of money if the Seahawks don't budge on their stance that they do no re-do contracts until the final year of the deal.
In addition to the $30,000 per-day fines for each day that Chancellor misses in training camp (up to 38 days), the team can go after 1-percent of his signing bonus proration ($1M for 2015) for every day he misses camp, up to 25 days (so, up to $250,000). The Seahawks can then recoup an additional 25-percent of Kam's signing bonus if he misses a regular season game ($250,000 more). The new CBA was not designed to be favorable for holdouts, as Joel Corry broke down last year.
Per Corry:
A team can fine a player a maximum of $30,000 for each day of training camp he misses.... A team can also recover a portion of a player's signing bonus. Fifteen percent of the prorated amount of signing bonus can be recouped on the sixth day of a training camp holdout. It's one percent for each additional missed day with a maximum of 25 percent of the prorated amount during training camp. An additional 25 percent can be recovered with the first missed regular season game. After four missed weeks, a team can recover 1/17 of the prorated amount for each additional week of the player's absence. The maximum a team can recover in a season is the entire prorated amount of the player's signing bonus in that contract year.
In addition to the fines, Chancellor faces the prospect of missing out on game checks, and he will forfeit $267,647 of salary for each week he misses. All said, for a guy that's due to make $4.5 million in 2015, that's a pretty huge amount of money to risk.
Right now, it's about resolve, but Chancellor frankly does not have a ton of leverage, because the team stands to risk a lot if they bend to his demands. It's not about how much they love Kam, as John Schneider mentioned the other day, it's about setting a dangerous precedent for future negotiations. The team simply can't do that.
"I don't think they should give him one penny more than he is already making," former NFL agent and now CBS analyst Joel Corry told Bob Condotta. "Nothing has really changed in the market since he signed, so he's out of line."
As Corry has pointed out several times, Chancellor's deal is already at the top of the strong safety market anyway. Corry went on to say that the team should even take it as far as to uphold some of the fines in order to deter future holdouts.
"One thing they need to do to nip this stuff in the bud in the future is enforce some of the fine, if not all of it," he said. "And take back the signing bonus, because you have to have a deterrent. Because they waived the fines for Marshawn, even though the deal he took was on the table before the holdout, the perception to the players is that he got something out of the holdout and then they didn't enforce the fine. So that's the problem. They have sort of emboldened players to test them."
Of course, it's a little dangerous to make Chancellor an example, because of his status as a team leader and fan favorite. It's a touchy situation.
Kam Chancellor's holdout hits day nine - Field Gulls