GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Mike Daniels was elated last year when he was told he nearly tripled his salary for 2015 thanks to a little-known -- and completely unknown to him -- provision called the “proven performance escalator.”

That bumped the Green Bay Packers defensive end’s base pay from $660,000 to more than $1.5 million for the final season of his rookie contract.

So you would’ve thought Daniels’ excitement level would have been off the charts on Monday after he signed a four-year, $42 million extension that included a $12 million signing bonus.

Instead, Daniels still wanted to talk about the chip he’s had on his shoulder ever since high school -- when he was lightly recruited -- and that he carried through the University of Iowa and into the NFL draft, where some teams viewed him as too short to be an every-down player.

“I’m still pissed,” said Daniels, who was a fourth-round pick in 2012. “That’s never going to change. It’s just how I approach the game. It’s how I play. The fact that I signed a contract doesn’t change the fact that I got overlooked in high school, doesn’t change the fact that I was consistently called short coming out of the draft [and that] I’m not strong, I can’t play the run and all this other stuff. It doesn’t change the fact that I had to grind to get to where I’m at. Success is just a product of the work I’m doing. I’ll just keep on working.”

Daniels opted to sign three months before he could have tested the open market as a free agent. After months without much dialogue with Packers general manager Ted Thompson and contract negotiator Russ Ball, the deal came together quickly, Daniels said.

“That's just kind of how it happened,” he said. “My agent called me, gave me the [details] and had to agree with him. I told him I wanted to be in Green Bay. I want to be with this team. This team is in it every year.”

Who knows how much more money, if any, Daniels could have attracted on the open market? His average per year of $10.5 million on the new deal made him the NFL's third-highest paid 3-4 defensive end.

“Why would I want to go anywhere else?” Daniels said. “So my agent, I told him 'Make sure we're still in Green Bay,' and he did. And like I said, I thank Russ and Ted and all those guys upstairs for making sure that I'm still here.”