Kam Chancellor ended his holdout and returned to the Seattle Seahawks fold on Wednesday, ending an absence that extended from training camp and the preseason through Week 2 of the 2015 NFL season and will cost Chancellor over $2 million - though the team and Chancellor's agent Alvin Keels will likely attempt to hammer out a deal intended to see those contractual penalties rescinded. Still, Chancellor is home and the vaunted Legion of Boom backfield is again whole. Well, whole in name, if not necessarily in body. Per a report from Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports, Chancellor's decision to holdout may have been less about the money - OK, it was definitely still about the money - and more to do with a knee that Chancellor fears will end his career eventually.
"What's been lost in all of this is what I've continued to hear was truly at the crux of this holdout: Chancellor's health," La Canfora reports. "He plays the game like a human battering ram, he gives of his body as freely as anyone in this league and he means much more to Seattle's rise to be a perennial Super Bowl contender than just his tackling and interceptions. He is the mental and emotional leader of the club, he regulates that locker room, and he keeps the knuckleheads in line. He is the Alpha Male who can tell a Richard Sherman to shut up or tell a Bruce Irvin to sit down. It's his team. And all of that has a unique worth.
"When Chancellor played through the Super Bowl with a torn MCL, a knee that could certainly give him issues down the line, it crystallized just how fleeting all of this can be, sources said. It was a flash point that put into perspective what he was asking of himself every Sunday from September through January."
Chancellor, despite holding the highest-paying contract for a strong safety in the league, does not have any of the money in the final two years of the deal, 2016 and 2017, guaranteed. His knee injury to end last season apparently pushed him to see guaranteed figures added to his deal.
Unfortunately for Chancellor, it's a knee and an injury that the team was all-too-aware of as well, meaning they knew they simply had to wait him out in order to see him return to the fold. Sure, they'd suffer some from his absence, but a player with such a short shelf life who plays such a physical, demanding brand of football, wasn't going to stay away, wasn't going to miss game checks for long.
In the end, both the money and Chancellor's health are one and the same. His job is to play as hard as he can for as long as he can and win as much as he can. It's also to make those years, those snaps count in terms of a future for himself and his family. So, the holdout was about money.
But it was about the fear that his knee - or some other injury - would steal that money, would end his high earning potential sooner rather than later.
The Seahawks stood strong and won - it was their only choice in the situation. But Chancellor wasn't wrong to want to see his deal re-worked. And the team wasn't wrong - based on the power they hold in the situation and the watchful eyes of the rest of the league - to stand firm.
