Brandon Aiyuk gets brutally honest about what held up contract talks with 49ers

The nation's long national nightmare ended last week: Brandon Aiyuk and the 49ers agreed to the terms that every single person expected Brandon Aiyuk and the 49ers to agree to. The Niners' star receiver is now set to stay in SF for four more years to the tune of around $30 million per year, which would make just about any receiver not named Ja'Marr Chase very happy.

The real takeaway from the Aiyuk-Niners contract saga was that contract sags are perhaps the most annoying thing about professional football. It was just six endless weeks of non-updates being shoehorned into the A-block of the 6PM episode of SportsCenter, followed by a full day's worth of web aggregation to follow. We are all 10 times worse for it, except for Aiyuk, who is roughly 120 million times better for it. And in a recent press conference this week, he revealed some of why the final terms took so long to get done. It's important to remember that this is a light-hearted moment, and that we're all here to have a good time, and that you don't have to press send on that Tweet.

Brandon Aiyuk makes surprising admission about 49ers contract talks

"I'm not going to lie, I made it a little bit more difficult than I needed to at the end," he said. "It was like that, I'm not going to say the whole entire time, but for about the past month, I think we were pretty good."

I mean, I'm all for it. I'm sure there's a vocal minority of Niners fans out there who absolutely cannot stand the idea of a player making life hard on the front office, but no one's forcing you to listen to them or follow them on Twitter or even acknowledge their existence.

There are only a few times in a player's career when they have the leverage over their employer like Aiyuk had – and a lot of times, players never get that sort of opportunity. If you successfully get your generationally wealthy team owner to fork over 10% more than he was willing to a couple weeks ago, that's a huge win worth making negotiations difficult for.