Deebo Samuel doesn’t seem happy with how his contract negotiations are going with the 49ers. Samuel recently scrubbed his social media of all connection to the 49ers and is choosing not to participate in on-field work during the team’s voluntary workouts starting on Tuesday.
This is not the first time the 49ers have negotiated a lucrative extension with John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan in charge. George Kittle signed a five-year, $75 million deal in 2020 and Fred Warner signed a five-year, $95 million extension last offseason. Both made the players the highest paid at their respective positions.
Samuel probably won’t end up making the over $30 million in annual salary it would take to make him the league’s highest paid receiver, but there’s another reason that his negotiations are going differently according to Matt Maiocco of NBC Sports.
Via Maiocco:
When I think about the two previous situations, the previous two years with George Kittle and Fred Warner, those were slow-moving deals too. I remember I think the 49ers presented their first formal offer to Kittle representation on Feb. 14 of 2020 and Kittle’s agent referred to it after the fact…I believe he called it the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
What happened with Kittle is Kittle completely stayed out of it and never put any hints out there for what he was going through, and basically on the eve of training camp the deal was signed. Then Fred Warner, it was just crickets all around. Fred Warner didn’t say a word, his representation didn’t say a word and then the deal got done.
As I recall, George Kittle basically said ‘Hey, I’m going to go to all the offseason stuff. I’m a leader, I feel that that’s part of my duty as a leader, and the contract stuff is something completely different.’ And Fred Warner did the exact same thing. George kind of set the tone for how to handle something like this, and I think those two were kind of talking throughout and they had an idea of how this whole thing would play out.
So those deals got done with — at least on the outside — not a whole lot of drama. This is different, now. It doesn’t surprise me that Deebo Samuel is staying away from the conditioning part of this, because he prefers to work out in Miami. But once they get on the field, which is in I think three weeks, that’s when the paths start to diverge a little bit from what Warner and Kittle did. Actually they’ve already diverged because Deebo did the very public situation of removing 49ers from all of his social media.
So it’s a little bit different, but other than that I don’t see any differences in what I would expect to happen and the time frame by which something would happen.
Maiocco still believes the 49ers will strike a deal with Deebo near the top of the WR market, a number that would put him in the $25 million per year range.
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