Community Tailgate: Kam Chancellor’s Holdout

With the NFL season nearly underway, we’ll have a whole new series of topics to discuss in the coming weeks, and PFR’s Community Tailgate is designed to address those topics. What’s the Community Tailgate all about? Well, it’s pretty simple. Every weekday, we’ll highlight one of the top stories going on in the NFL. Then, in the comment section below, we want you to weigh in and let us know what you think.

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Speaking to reporters today, Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll confirmed that star safety Kam Chancellor is continuing his holdout and has yet to report to the team. As Ian Rapoport of NFL.com tweets, that means Carroll and his club expect to take the field in Week 1 without Chancellor in the secondary.

“He’s not here right now, so he’s not playing,” Carroll said. “That’s that.”

When Chancellor, who wants the Seahawks to rework his contract, began his holdout earlier in the summer, many observers were skeptical that he would stay away from the team this long. For the most part, players who hold out eventually relent before the possibility of missing game checks becomes a reality. Conversely, many teams are willing to at least temporarily placate their players by moving some salary around and giving them a little extra money up front — the Seahawks did that with Marshawn Lynch a year ago.

In this case though, neither side appears willing to budge. Chancellor just signed his contract two years ago, and it runs through the 2017 season, so the Seahawks are understandably hesitant to set a precedent by giving their star safety a raise already. On the other hand, Chancellor is one of the leaders of one of the league’s best defenses, and will earn base salaries of just $4.55MM in 2015 and $5.1MM in 2016. Given the lack of longevity for most NFL players’ careers, it’s hard to blame the 27-year-old for wanting to maximize his earnings while he can.

With Chancellor poised to miss the Seahawks’ first game of the year, he’d become the first player who signed a contract under the current Collective Bargaining Agreement to miss game action due to a holdout, tweets Albert Breer of the NFL Network. Rapoport notes (via Twitter) that Carson Palmer was the last player to extend a holdout into the regular season, sitting out the first six games of the 2011 season before the Bengals traded him to the Raiders.

How do you see this situation playing out now that Chancellor is on the verge of missing the Seahawks’ opener? Will he or the Seahawks eventually give in? Will he be traded? Or will the stand-off drag on throughout the season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!