Relations between the Chargers and safety Eric Weddle haven’t been good this offseason as the safety has stayed away from workouts in an effort to get a new contract that the team hasn’t felt moved to give him.
Weddle’s agent David Canter said that the team told him they won’t talk about a new contract for Weddle before his current deal expires after the 2015 season, leading Canter to say that Weddle would drop his special teams work -- he played almost half the team’s snaps in the kicking game since 2011 while playing almost every defensive snap -- because Weddle feels “going above and beyond for them is why they won’t give him a contract extension.”
Chargers General Manager Tom Telesco said that the team listened to Weddle’s case that someone who plays that much is worth more to the team, but feel that Weddle’s $7.5 million salary puts him “at the top of the market” for safeties and that the team decided they didn’t want to match what Weddle was looking for in a new deal.
We do take great pride in how we treat our players here -- players, coaches, scouts, staff -- everyone in the organization,” Telesco said on the Mighty 1090, via ESPN.com. “Anyone that’s been around the building the last couple years has seen that first hand. We said before the draft that we would talk after the draft. And we did. And we talked multiple times. We listened to their concerns about his current contract. We listened to their complaints about playing too much. And we read through their statistical analysis and their financial comparisons. We went through all of that stuff. We just decided that we’re just not at their numbers right now. It’s really as simple as that. There’s no sinister agenda there, nothing like that. Just right now it’s not there.”
Telesco said he’s spoken to Weddle and said that the team knows “he’ll be ready to go” when he reports for work this year. Telesco expects that return to come at this week’s mandatory minicamp.
