It’s a week until the deadline for players with franchise tags to sign multi-year deals with their teams and there are varying degrees of confidence about the prospect for such agreements around the league.
Bears wide receiver Alshon Jeffery is one of the players looking for a contract, but signs have pointed to him playing out the year on the tag for a while even as talks have continued with the Bears. Mike Garafolo of NFL Media reports that confidence that those talks will result in an agreement is low.
Per Garafolo, the Bears would like to pay less than the $14.6 million that Jeffery is guaranteed under the terms of the franchise tender while Jeffery wants a deal that pays more than the $11 million-plus that Doug Baldwin and Keenan Allen got in extensions they signed recently.
The presence of a deadline has helped bridge such gaps in the past and any open lines of communication mean that could be the case again this year. If not, though, Jeffery will help himself by showing he can stay healthier than he did last season before resuming the push for the long-term deal he’s looking for in 2017.