The Chargers settled one of their two priority extensions in May, when Derwin James Jr. signed a three-year, $75.6 million deal with $57.5 million fully guaranteed, per NFL Network. That leaves the other one — and as camp approaches, Tuli Tuipulotu‘s deal is now the piece of business that will define Los Angeles’s summer.
General manager Joe Hortiz said after the draft that James and Tuipulotu were the front office’s two extension priorities, and the sequencing was never mysterious: James’s deal was a known market, a great safety being paid like one. Tuipulotu’s negotiation is harder because his market moved underneath it. The edge rusher enters the final year of his rookie contract coming off a 13-sack, Pro Bowl season in 2025, and comparable deals have reset the position — Sports Illustrated points to Jaelan Phillips’s four-year, $120 million contract in Carolina as a plausible floor, well above the roughly $74 million over four years Spotrac had estimated for Tuipulotu earlier this offseason.
The player, for his part, is saying the things teams like to hear while conceding nothing. Tuipulotu told reporters at minicamp he is leaving the negotiation to his agent and focusing on football: “I don’t know [a timeline], but I’m going to be here. I’m going to be with the team,” per Chargers.com. He did not, notably, rule out a hold-in — the modern compromise in which a player reports to camp, attends everything and practices nothing while his representatives work.
Chargers history offers both comfort and caution here. This franchise has generally gotten its cornerstone defenders signed — James himself has now been extended twice — but rarely early, and rarely without a tense August. The difference this time is leverage: Tuipulotu is 23, productive, and playing a position where the franchise tag is expensive and the open market is merciless to teams that wait. Every week that passes, the Phillips deal sits there as the reference point, and reference points at edge rusher only move in one direction.
Rookies report July 23 and veterans July 28, with practices at The Bolt starting July 29. If Tuipulotu is in uniform but idle that week, it will not be a surprise. It will be the negotiation, conducted in plain sight.
