Chargers Clips
The Seahawks have met with a potential addition to their backfield.
The NFL’s daily transaction report shows that they reported a visit with running back Najee Harris. Harris is coming off of a torn Achilles that ended his 2025 season with the Chargers in Week Three.
Harris recently shared a video of him sprinting on a treadmill to update where things stand in his return to health. Harris also suffered an eye injury in a fireworks accident last summer, but returned to play in the first three games of the season. He ran 15 times for 61 yards and caught three passes for 25 yards.
Harris had four straight seasons with at least 1,000 rushing yards with the Steelers to open his career.
Kenneth Walker left the Seahawks for the Chiefs as a free agent this month and Zach Charbonnet is recovering from a torn ACL. The newly signed Emanuel Wilson joins Cam Akers, George Holani, Kenny McIntosh, and Jacardia Wright on the running back depth chart.
The Chargers have added some depth for their offensive line.
Los Angeles announced on Wednesday that the club has signed Kayode Awosika.
Awosika, 27, spent the last four seasons with the Lions. He appeared in 13 games with four starts for the club last season, on the field for 35 percent of offensive snaps and 18 percent of special teams snaps in games played.
Awosika entered the league as an undrafted free agent out of the University at Buffalo in 2021. He’s played 50 games with 11 starts for the Eagles and Lions in his career.
Offensive lineman Foster Sarell failed to make the Commanders during training camp last summer, but he’ll take another shot at it in 2026.
The Commanders announced that they have signed Sarell on Tuesday. No terms of the deal were disclosed.
Sarell was released by Washington last August and wound up on the Chargers’ practice squad. He went on to play six games and make one start during the regular season.
The move to the Chargers was also a return engagement for Sarell. He played in 35 games and made three starts for the AFC West team between 2021 and 2024. He also had brief stints with the Ravens and Giants after going undrafted out of Stanford in 2021.
Six months after tearing his Achilles tendon, free agent running back Najee Harris wants NFL teams to see that his recovery is on pace.
Harris’s agent posted video of him sprinting on a treadmill this week. Harris tore his Achilles in his third game with the Chargers, on September 21.
Running in a straight line on a treadmill is a far cry from the kind of cutting a running back has to do on the football field, but being able to sprint in March is a good sign that he’ll be able to do everything he has to do by Week One.
2025 was a rough year for Harris, who also injured his eye in a fireworks accident on the Fourth of July. That forced him to miss a lot of work in training camp and the preseason, but he was ready to go by the start of the regular season.
The 28-year-old Harris signed a one-year contract with the Chargers last year but was lost for the season after carrying the ball just 15 times. He had previously played for the Steelers, who drafted him in the first round in 2021, for four seasons and topped 1,000 yards in all four of them.
Two days before the inaugural Fanatics Flag Football Classic, there’s been an injury replacement.
Fanatics has announced that Chargers safety Derwin James Jr. suffered a “minor injury” earlier in the week, before reporting to the event. He’ll be replaced by longtime Vikings safety Harrison Smith.
A first-round pick in 2012 and a 14-year veteran, the Vikings released Smith last week.
Smith was a six-time Pro Bowler. He landed on the All-Pro first team in 2017 and the All-Pro second team in 2018.
He joins the Wildcats team captained by Jayden Daniels and Joe Burrow in Saturday’s three-team flag football tournament. Earlier this month, the event was moved from Saudi Arabia to Los Angeles.
Tony Jefferson is ready for another run with the Chargers.
Jefferson and the Chargers have agreed to a one-year contract, according to Jordan Schultz.
It’s the third year in a row Jefferson has signed a one-year deal with the Chargers. He also signed with them in 2024 and 2025, starting both seasons on the practice squad but then spending most of his time on the active roster. Last year Jefferson played in 13 games with eight starts.
The 34-year-old Jefferson originally signed with the Cardinals as an undrafted rookie in 2013. He then played for the Ravens, 49ers, Ravens again and Giants before announcing his retirement and sitting out the 2023 season. He un-retired when he signed with the Chargers in 2024.
Free agent offensive tackle Austin Deculus reached an agreement today with the Titans, Adam Schefter of ESPN reports.
Deculus, 27, spent last season with the Chargers.
He started five games on the team’s injury-plagued line last season and set career-highs with 13 game appearances, 516 offensive snaps and 41 special teams snaps.
Deculus entered the NFL as a sixth-round pick of the Texans in 2022.
He spent three seasons in his hometown, playing 13 games with one start.
The Texans traded him to the Chargers last August.
Despite playing with one of the league’s best quarterbacks last season with the Chargers, tight end Tyler Conklin had his worst season since 2019.
He played a career-low 13 games and saw the second-fewest offensive touches of his career (169), finishing with seven receptions for 101 yards in his only season with the Chargers.
Conklin, 30, signed with the Lions in free agency and expressed confidence in being able to rebound this season.
“I think I can definitely be very productive in the pass game still,” Conklin said, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “I think just because one situation didn’t quite work out the way anybody wanted it doesn’t mean you just, like, can’t do it anymore.”
Conkin, who arrives as the No. 3 tight end behind Sam LaPorta and Brock Wright, caught 50-plus passes for four consecutive seasons for the Vikings (2021) and Jets (2022-24) before landing with the Chargers. New Lions offensive coordinator Drew Petzing ran more three-tight-end sets than any play-caller in the NFL the past three seasons with the Cardinals.
“Whether I’m catching passes, whether I’m blocking more, whether I’m playing special teams, whether I’m just mentoring, whatever that role is, I want to help this team win,” Conklin said. “But I’ve definitely got a lot of good football left in me.”
The Chargers are meeting with a potential addition to their offensive line to kick off the second week of free agency.
Jeremy Fowler of ESPN reports that guard Spencer Burford arrived for a visit with the team on Sunday night. It’s the first reported visit for Burford since the start of the new league year.
Burford was a 2022 49ers fourth-round pick and he started 29 games over his first two seasons. Burford was a reserve in all of his 2024 appearances, but returned to make 11 starts — including both 49ers playoff games — in 2025.
The Chargers released guard Mekhi Becton earlier this month and center Bradley Bozeman retired, but they have signed center Tyler Biadasz and guard Cole Strange to bolster their line in recent days.
A day before Seahawks G.M. John Schneider addressed the potential impact of Washington’s looming “millionaire tax” on the defending Super Bowl champions, Simms and I stumbled into a conversation about state income taxes during PFT Live.
The spark came from the trade that has sent defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa from the Cowboys (and Texas) to the 49ers (and California). In his last stop, there was no state income tax. At his new team, he’ll lose 13.3 percent, off the top.
It’s not as clean and simple as every penny of compensation being taxed, or not, by the state where the team plays. For road trips, the game check is taxed by the state in which the game happens. It gets more complicated as to per-game roster bonuses. As we hear it, some states try to tax the visiting player based also on a percentage of the full-year roster bonuses and/or the prorated portion of the signing bonus for the season in which the game is played.
And, yes, the lack of state income tax becomes a selling point in free agency, which explains Schneider’s concerns about Washington’s tax rate for millionaires increasing from 0.0 percent to 9.9. But, as Odighizuwa will learn the hard way, that doesn’t matter if the free-agent contract also doesn’t include a no-trade clause.
Regardless, the variations in state income tax create an imbalance as it relates to the most important aspect of anyone’s pay — how much they take home.
Simms mentioned on Thursday’s PFT Live that he heard something interesting from someone in the league who saw the tax discussion from the day before. (And, yes, plenty of people in the league watch PFT Live — probably because it features no phony debates, no false praise, no reckless hype, no minced words, and no performative antics.) There’s an argument to be made that the salary cap should take state income taxes into account.
It would be complicated, given that taxes depend on where games are played. Still, every team has eight or nine home games per year. That’s roughly half of the compensation, taxed based on where the team is located.
The real question is whether teams should get more to spend, given that more of what is paid will end up being taken off the top by the state government. Some teams may not want to do it, since having a higher cap means having a higher floor means spending more money that otherwise would be siphoned away as pure profit.
And the numbers would be significant. At a 2026 salary cap of $301.2 million, providing the Rams, Chargers, and 49ers with a 13.3-percent bump would push the cap to $341.2 million for those teams.
The deeper question is whether state income taxes make a competitive difference. As noted the other day, most of the teams in the no-tax states haven’t been to a Super Bowl this century. (The Seahawks and Buccaneers are the exception; the Titans, Cowboys, Dolphins, Jaguars, and Texans are not.)
Part of the problem is that most players don’t fret about state income taxes, even if they should. Players focus mainly on annual average, the true locker-room measuring stick that determines the pecking order among the most and least valuable players.
Although it would indeed be difficult to come up with the right way to determine cap credits, since the total tax burden depends on where games are played, that would be doable. The bigger challenge would be to get all teams in states with income tax to agree to a higher cap in order to account for it.
News flash: Not every team is as obsessed with winning as they pretend to be. For many owners, it’s about profit. Having more money to spend means having less to buy giant yachts or that much-needed tenth home. Especially since the owners of the teams in the high-tax states are also paying those increased rates, too.
Just kidding. The ultra-rich have seemingly cracked the code on eating nearly every ounce of what they kill. Which is another reason why the owners of the teams in the high-tax states won’t want to have more to spend — even if they have to say they do.
