NFL players who are unhappy with their contracts routinely miss voluntary offseason work. They sometimes even miss mandatory training camp practices, which come with fines of $40,000 a day. But they hardly ever hold out into the regular season.
That’s because players get their base salaries in 17 weekly game checks, and players who don’t show up to work for a week are docked one-seventeenth of their salaries. A player has to be really unhappy with his contract to forego that kind of money.
Texans offensive tackle Duane Brown and Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald are really unhappy with their contracts. And both are continuing to hold out as the regular season begins.
Brown, whose base salary is $9.4 million, will lose $552,941 this week, and every week he continues his holdout. Donald, whose base salary is just over $1.8 million, will lose $106,014 a week.
The last player to leave that kind of money on the table was Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor, who held out through the first two games of the 2015 season. His holdout didn’t work, as he ended up reporting and playing out two more years under his old deal before agreeing to a new contract this year. Brown and Donald will hope to get a new deal sooner than that.