Saints camp is supposed to be about Kellen Moore installing his offense and figuring out who lines up where in Week 1. Instead, the biggest storyline through the first week has nothing to do with scheme and everything to do with money. Chris Olave, the guy who's quietly been one of the better route-runners in football since he stepped into the league, is not doing team drills, and the reason floating around is the one every Saints fan feared: a stalled contract.
The news broke that Olave is sitting out full team drills while he pushes for a new deal.
Context matters here, because this isn't a Le'Veon Bell-style sit-the-whole-year holdout. Olave is still going through individual work, he's just staying out of the drills where contact is a possibility. Part of that caution traces back to a scary offseason detail: Olave was treated for a blood clot back in January, the same issue that knocked him out of Week 18 last year. The Saints have said there are no lingering issues and this is just risk management, not a setback.
But the timing lines up too cleanly with the contract stuff to pretend it's unrelated. Olave is playing this season on his $15.5 million fifth-year option, and the receiver market has completely exploded around him since he was drafted. His own Ohio State teammates have already cashed in — Garrett Wilson got his bag from the Jets, and Jaxson Smith-Njigba just reset the entire position with a deal reportedly worth more than $42 million a year. Olave watching two guys he ran routes with in college blow past him on the pay scale while he sits on a rookie option is exactly the kind of thing that gets an extension conversation moving.
Olave himself said back in May he was hoping to get a new deal done before camp even opened, telling reporters he felt like things were trending that way. That obviously didn't happen. GM Mickey Loomis has confirmed talks are ongoing, and the expectation around the building is still that an extension gets done before the season kicks off — this reads more like a negotiation playing out in real time than a scorched-earth standoff.
Fantasy managers should care about this for reasons well beyond Saints Twitter drama. Olave is coming off a career-best workload before injuries derailed his 2025, and any camp reps he misses now are reps he's not building chemistry with Moore's passing game in. If the deal gets done soon, this becomes a non-story fast. If it drags into the regular season, it's the kind of thing that quietly tanks a receiver's ADP while everyone waits for the ink to dry.