The Eye-Opener: Kam, Kam, he’s our man, time to re-sign him if you can

The question is not whether the Seahawks should extend Kam Chancellor’s contract.

Of course they should.

Not only does he remain one of the team’s best performers on the field, but he is the Captain with a capital C not just on his jersey but in the locker room. He’s the guy people listen to – even Richard Sherman.

The question is not how the Seahawks should extend Chancellor, either. They’ve set that precedent with the second of the two flavors of extensions:

1. Buy young. This is Seattle’s most common technique. The Seahawks take a player entering the last year of his rookie contract (or in K.J. Wright’s case, in the midst of the final year of that deal) and offer him an extension. The player gets a big payday one year before he would have hit the open market. The team enjoys a little bit of leverage because it’s absorbing some of the risk that would otherwise be taken by the player. The net result is that Seattle has found a better way to retain more of its top talent than it otherwise would. We’ll explain the reason why in more detail on Friday when we get to Justin Britt, but since we’re talking about Chancellor here, let’s skip to the second technique.

2. The veteran bonus. Seattle used this technique first with Marshawn Lynch after the Super Bowl loss to New England and then last year with Michael Bennett. If buying young lets Seattle purchase the prime years of more players, well, this technique is more about buying a veteran’s happiness (or in the case of Lynch in 2015, making him not necessarily happy, but less holdout-ish). Essentially, Seattle pays out a significant signing bonus, which will be pro-rated over the length of the extension, to make the existing deal more palatable to the player. The difference between this and “buying young” is that Seattle is not expecting the player to be on the team for multiple years. In fact, Lynch’s deal was signed with the explicit understanding that he might move on.

Lynch’s signing bonus for the three-year extension? $7.5 million. Bennett’s signing bonus for the three-year extension he signed last December? $8 million.

Hmmm, it’s almost like there’s a pattern there. The main difference being that Bennett was in the second-to-last year of his deal while Lynch – like Chancellor – was entering the final year of his existing contract.

Clayton: Can Seahawks keep their safety duo together?

So if there’s not a question of whether Chancellor should be extended or how he would be extended, what’s the hold-up?

Chancellor. And for very good reason.

He turned 29 in April, making him two months younger than Miami safety Reshad Jones. That’s significant because Jones signed a five-year, $60 million contract with the Dolphins earlier this year. That’s a whole lot of loot for a player who’s not as impactful as Chancellor.

Two years after Chancellor signed a contracted extension with the Seahawks in 2013, he felt so underpaid that he held out. Will he seek to maximize his earning this time around by waiting until he’s a free agent?

If you can’t say something nice: No sooner had the Panthers fired general manager Dave Gettleman than some of the team’s former players began sounding off. Steve Smith posted a picture of himself laughing. DeAngelo Williams called Gettleman a snake and promptly removed the Panthers from the list of four teams he wouldn’t play for.

But as Dave Wyman pointed out on our show, having players grumpy with the general manager isn’t necessarily a bad thing, per se, because you know who the players would really like as a GM? A pushover, and as Wyman said, you don’t want the GM functioning like a bank machine. At least not in a salary-capped league like the NFL.

The GM has to strike a difficult balance. On the one hand, he must be judicious in which players he plays and how much to pay them. On the other, he can’t engender feelings that he is a disrespectful jerk that’s looking to wring as much as possible out of a player for as little as possible.

The kicker: As someone who drives through the South Lake Union neighborhood just about every day, I got very excited reading about a bill passed by the Honolulu city council making it illegal for a pedestrian to look at a cell phone while crossing the street. Seriously.

I know that deviates from the standard line in which we’re supposed to revere the pedestrian as an anti-pollutant, healthy living embodiment of everything that is good about the modern city, buuuuuuut anyone who feels that way has obviously never driven through South Lake Union, which is chock full of earbud-wearing, phone-staring zombies who treat the neighborhood like it’s a college campus, crossing wherever they feel like it, while showing absolutely no awareness – let alone acknowledgment – of the motor vehicles that are driving on those same city streets.

I’m not saying that I will vote for any city council member who introduces a bill similar to the one in Hawaii, but I will definitely think about it.

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