Should the Chargers bring back Corey Liuget?
By Travis Wakeman
Corey Liuget has spent the past eight seasons with the Los Angeles Chargers and is available as a free agent.
The former first-round pick is wondering where his career will take him next after the Chargers decided to decline the option on his contract last month. Though that move severed ties between the team and player, it could only be a temporary separation.
Liuget remains a free agent and though the Chargers declined his contract option, that doesn’t mean the two sides can’t come to an agreement on a new deal. With each day that passes, that seems like a more likely scenario all the time.
Unless of course, Tom Telesco and his staff are happy pushing forward with what the team currently has. What does the team currently have at the defensive tackle position? Aside from the veteran Brandon Mebane, the team has second-year player Justin Jones and T.Y. McGill, who has played for six different teams in his career and has 23 total tackles.
Is that going to cut it? One would think the answer is no.
Could Telesco find a player or two in the draft? Of course, but for a guy who seems to value experience, that doesn’t fit his m.o., particularly with the way he has gone about this offseason.
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There are bigger names on the open market such as Ndamukong Suh and Timmy Jernigan, but bringing in a player like that would detract even further from what Telesco likes to do.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us at Liuget.
Liuget is coming off a season that started with a league-mandated suspension and ended after a torn quad tendon in Week 11. All of that limited him to just six games in which he had 1.5 sacks and a fumble recovery.
But for his career, Liuget has made 103 starts for the Chargers, registering 275 tackles and 24 sacks. He just turned 29 years old, which is five years younger than Mebane, who was re-signed by the team.
For Telesco, Liuget checks the boxes of experience in the league and experience with the team. If the two sides can come together on a short-term contract that pays him much less than the $4 million he was originally scheduled to make in 2019.