UPDATED 8/29/16 2:45 p.m.:
The Chargers have finally agreed to a four-year contract with their top draft pick Joey Bosa. They announced the deal on Monday afternoon:
UPDATED 8/25/16, 10:50 a.m.:
Joey Bosa's agent responded to the Chargers' statement by putting out a statement of his own. You can read it below:
It is unfortunate the San Diego Chargers have decided to manipulate facts and negotiate in the media. The team surely is not strengthening its relationship with Joey Bosa by taking this stance and making their position public.
We have decided that we will not engage in public negotiations or discuss numbers and/or terms in this negotiation.
We will say, that it is ironic that the team now takes issue with the timing of Joey’s arrival, since the Chargers unilaterally decided to remain silent for the first 14 days of training camp instead of replying in a timely fashion to the proposal we made on the eve of training camp on July 28th.
At this point, all we can do is continue to fight for a fair contract on behalf of our client, as we do for all of our clients. The Chargers can focus on trying to sway public opinion, but our focus will remain on our client and securing a contract for him that is fair and consistent with his draft position.
See original story below.
The Joey Bosa situation in San Diego just got even messier.
If you haven’t been keeping up with it, Bosa—the No. 3 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft—has been unable to reach a contract agreement with the Chargers. It’s been a very complicated negotiation process (you can try to make sense of it here, but…good luck) although the main issue seems to be that Bosa wants the Chargers to pay him his full $17 million signing bonus now and the team wants to offset at least half of that payment until next March. As a result, the two sides have hit a standstill, and it doesn’t appear as though Bosa is going to be joining the team in training camp anytime soon. It’s actually gotten so bad that Bosa’s mom Cheryl recently said she wished Joey had "pulled an Eli Manning" and demanded a trade after finding out the Chargers had drafted him.
Further complicating matters, the Chargers put out a statement Wednesday afternoon explaining where they stand at the moment. The team revealed that it put forth its "best offer" to Bosa this week and got rejected. So, the team has decided to pull that offer since they based it on Bosa participating in training camp, preseason games, and the regular season. You can read the full statement below. Most statements like this are very vague, but it’s clear the Chargers wanted to send a strong message to Bosa and his camp with this:
At this point, it doesn’t seem like Bosa is even remotely close to playing for the Chargers this NFL season. And if we had to guess, this is only going to get uglier from here. As ESPN’s Adam Schefter said a short time ago:
Have fun sorting this mess out, guys.
