Seahawks’ Wagner on Thomas: ‘We want him back’

RENTON — Earl Thomas continues to stay away from Seattle Seahawks’ offseason workouts. Right now, it is for show.

Next week, it starts being for dough.

Seattle ends voluntary organized team activities of practices on the field this week. The team can begin fining its three-time All-Pro safety next week, if Thomas also skips Seattle’s lone mandatory veteran minicamp of this offseason. That is June 12-14. The Seahawks could fine him up to $84,000 if Thomas misses all three days of that minicamp, per the league’s collective bargaining agreement.

Fellow All-Pro Bobby Wagner thinks Thomas will be back to the Seahawks sooner than later, and before training camp that begins July 26. Missing training camp is also a daily, finable offense.

“We want him back,” Wagner said following Monday’s OTA practice.

“We appreciate him.”

Wagner says the love he’s professed this offseason while the Seahawks have listened to trade offers for Thomas and talked to the safety’s agents about a contract extension is “from the heart.” Those talks between the Seahawks and Thomas’ folks about a new deal broke off from March into May, the last time general manager John Schneider commented on the situation and said he’d had no recent negotiations.

“I feel like we don’t appreciate, as players, (guys) until they are gone,” said Wagner, the leader of a Seattle defense that since January has lost Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Michael Bennett, Cliff Avril, Jeremy Lane and other past starters. “I feel like that’s true of life: We don’t appreciate who we have until they are gone. So I’m trying to focus on making sure everybody knows they are appreciated.”

Wagner also said that with Thomas away, and with other veterans gone, “I understand that eyes go towards me.”

Skipping voluntary offseason workouts is about the only way an NFL player can show he wants a new contract — without losing money, that is. Teams can’t fine players for not being at voluntary workouts, only mandatory ones.

Defensive end Frank Clark and cornerback Byron Maxwell are also absent from this round of OTAs.

Clark is the team’s most proven returning sack man. He is entering the final year of his rookie contract.

“Yes, he is taking (OTAs literally). It is voluntary,” coach Pete Carroll. “He is doing exactly that.”

Maxwell? Who knows why the 30-year-old veteran is skipping these practices? The assumed starting cornerback who replaced the injured Sherman for the final two months of last season re-signed just last month, for one year and up to $2 million. The league’s free-agent market wasn’t exactly booming for him this spring.

“It’s called ‘voluntary,’” Carroll reiterated, when asked about Maxwell’s absence.

Coaches, teammates, Schneider, even Turf, the resident dog at Seahawks headquarters, know why Thomas and Clark are blowing off these workouts. Schneider has said multiple times since April that Thomas’ representatives have assured him Thomas will not hold out into the 2018 season.

So does making this spring “statement” in this way work? Does missing no-pads workouts in May and June, four and three months before the season, increase a guy’s bargaining position with the team?

Avril doesn’t think so.

The Seahawks’ Pro Bowl defensive end who had to end his Seattle career this offseason because of a neck injury and surgery, was talking about Clark skipping OTAs last week on Seattle’s KJR-AM radio.

“I think he’s showing he wants to get paid, as he should be,” Avril said.

“But I’m not even sure that works anymore.”

Exactly.

That is why Chancellor returned to the Seahawks two games into the 2015 season, after a two-month holdout. Well, that and Seattle’s 0-2 start to the ‘15 season. Chancellor’s gain from his 54 days away wanting a new deal? Zippo. He didn’t get an additional dime that year, the next year or even the year after that. The Seahawks eventually gave Chancellor what he wanted two years later. He received an extension with $25 million guaranteed last August, three months before he got a neck injury that has his career in doubt.

Chancellor is now awaiting a doctor’s assessment of MRIs and other tests of his neck due in the next month.

Duane Brown also wants a new deal from the Seahawks. The 32-year-old has said repeatedly, and since his first day in Seattle, he wants to end his career with the Seahawks.

The veteran left tackle Seattle acquired last fall in a trade with Houston is going about his desire opposite Thomas. Brown, nearly four years older than Thomas and a veteran of 11 NFL seasons, is here participating in each OTA practice and every Seahawks voluntary workout this offseason. He says he’s letting his agent handle any contract talks with the team, that he is focused on improving “and doing all I can for this team, and everything else will work itself out.”