Seahawks football is almost back. After some reassuring yet meaningless good preseason play (which came on the heels of meaningless bad preseason play), Marshawn Lynch and friends are headed to St. Louis to play the Rams on Sunday. Can you taste the near-insufferability? Can you smell it wafting through the air like so many bratwurst- and Bud Light-induced farts? I can. And it smells potentially glorious.

The Seahawks have a solid shot at being the best team in football for the fourth straight season*. They're entering the season relatively healthy and—aside from an untested offensive line—with shockingly few question marks on the depth chart. The defensive line could be one of the best in the league; the linebacking corps finally has real depth in Kevin Pierre-Louis; the receiving group is significantly bolstered by Jimmy Graham and Tyler Lockett; and the team’s four superstars—Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Russell Wilson—all look ready to go after a turbulent off-season.

So where the fuck is Kam Chancellor?

Short answer: somewhere that is not where he is contractually obligated to be in order to receive money in exchange for playing football.

Longer answer: holding out for more guaranteed money, despite having three years left on his contract and knowing damn well the Seahawks are limited in their ability to get him more money and are unlikely to break precedent by renegotiating the structure of the back-end of his deal due to a holdout. Kam will now all but surely be the first player to miss games holding out with a guaranteed contract since quarterback Carson Palmer did so for the 2011 Bengals.

Fucking hell, Kam.

Typically, I’m sympathetic to the concerns of NFL players with regards to their contracts. They are vastly underpaid due to a weak union that has allowed a salary cap that pays out a shockingly low percentage of revenue to its players given the league’s shocking profits.

But here’s the thing: Kam is already the second highest-paid player at his position, mere hundreds of dollars behind the highest-paid player. According to leaks from the negotiations, he’s attempting to secure a restructuring of the last two years of his contract to ensure that more money is paid out next season in case he gets hurt or declines. And if the Seahawks had not bent at all on this, a continued holdout might make sense.

But the rumor is they have bent. The initial distance between the two sides in the negotiation was $4 million of guaranteed money getting accelerated. Now the distance is $900,000. The Seahawks had no reason to bend, but it sounds like they bent enough to break themselves in future potential negotiations (next year’s dealings with the glorious Black Santa, Michael Bennett, could get ugly). And Kam still isn’t showing up.

All in all, this sucks for Seahawks fans. But it isn’t purely a matter of Kam and his agent Alvin Keels being dastardly (though history suggests his agent sucks a lot). All of this crap goes back to the draconian NFL salary cap, which serves only the interests of the owners. Compared to, say, European football leagues, where players earn 60-plus percent of the team’s revenue, the NFL hangs down around 50 percent, which is similar to NBA basketball. Given the violence and profitability of American football and the massive amount of bodies teams have to throw at merely surviving a season, this is some immoral bullshit.

And Kam is responding to that. I hate that this is happening, and hopefully a rumored week-two settlement is coming down the pipe. But a challenge to the status quo of football contracts was going to happen somewhere, and I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s happening in Seattle, where the players are good and individuality is praised.

Still though, as a Seahawks fan, I have to say: Kam, please stop tainting the beautiful fart smell of imminent football as soon as you can (by which I mean yesterday). The Quasi-Sufferable Road to Revenging and Reclaiming the Super Bowl is paved with your hits.

*Measured by overall DVOA.