John Schneider is the mirror image of Pete Carroll
The Seahawks are going to have a lot of spending money in 2026 and we actually have no idea what he plans to do with it
This past free agency was like the first time John Schneider was given an allowance by his parents and as expected this boy was like a kid in a candy store. If you think Sam Darnold and Cooper Kupp was a wild free agency field trip for the Seahawks, get into Bachman-Turner Overdrive cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Schneider must have mowed a lot of lawns this summer because Seattle’s 2026 cap space could dwarf the number he had to spend in 2025.
The Seahawks just had their biggest free agency period in franchise history (not sure what inflation would have to say about this but in total money spent, 2025 should be unprecedented) and next year Seattle is set to have a top-5 cap space number with almost certainly more room to be created with obvious cuts. Even if Schneider is generous to his own class of upcoming free agents, once you see the final numbers you’ll see that the team should still be able to wheel and deal with any team next year!
#ButFirst let’s review just how significant the difference has been in Seattle since the Seahawks cut the “PC” out of PCJS…
John Schneider is “BIZZARO Pete Carroll”
In his first 13 years in charge of the Seahawks, Carroll had never done anything quite as crazy in free agency as when he signed Dre’Mont Jones to a three-year, $51 million contract in 2023, his last at the helm, with only one exception:
In 2011, Seattle signed Sidney Rice and Zach Miller to 5-year deals, with Rice getting $41 million and Miller getting $34 million. It is perhaps because of those agreements, and then flushing $10 million for Matt Flynn the next year, that Pete decided to start trusting his judments of “value signings” over marquee names. (Before I’m roasted because “Miller was a good player”…yes he was a good player. He also had the largest tight end cap hit in the NFL in 2013 when he was 36th in tight end receiving yards.)
From then on, signings were low-level shots like $5 million on Michael Bennett and a two-year, $13 million deal for Cliff Avril and almost 10 years later a relatively bold move was a two-year, $19 million deal for Uchenna Nwosu. And that was working pretty well, aside from all the names we choose to forget (Cary Williams, Eddie Lacy, Luke Joeckel, etc.).
Carroll preferred at least 4 things over expensive outside free agents:
1-Re-signing his own players
2-Accumulating a lot of draft picks
3-Cheap outside free agents who he felt were undervalued
4-Trades for disgruntled stars wanting a new contract
Rather than seek players who made it to free agency, Carroll preferred the guys who were too good to ever get that far, similar to the Green Bay Packers trading for Micah Parsons on Thursday. Parsons is the type of NFL player who is never going to get to free agency until he’s past his prime.
Jimmy Graham wanted to be paid like a receiver. Duane Brown was holding out from the Texans not long before he was traded to Seattle. Jamal Adams, Percy Harvin, Sheldon Richardson, Jadeveon Clowney and so on, they wanted out once they weren’t getting paid by their old teams. So it wasn’t like the Seahawks avoided the expensive players who they didn’t develop, they just didn’t want the ones who made it to free agency without being franchise tagged.
That was until Jones in 2023, and less than a year after that Jody Allen made sure that Pete would never forget about Dre’.
But Schneider hasn’t acted like a GM who is spooked by the ghosts of Dre’Mont Jones and Matt Flynn, nor has he even flinched because of his own free agency flop tour of 2024. In fact, Schneider’s been the full hog Anti-Pete:
1-He traded his own players away (DK, Geno)
2-He traded up for a guy in almost-the-first round (Nick Emmanwori)
3-He dealt Darnold the most expensive hand in team history for an outsider FA
4-He did not trade for Hendrickson or Micah
The Seahawks got their feet wet in free agency in 2024, but Schneider’s floaties were still on because he had to manage the deals that Pete had given out before he was fired; the Quandre Diggs, Adams, Tyler Lockett, Dre’Mont pacts, and even including Geno to some degree.
When he got some financial freedom this past spring, Schneider was doing the backstroke while spitting water into the air after he was able to free himself of some of those anchors (Adams, Diggs, and Lockett alone took up $50 million of cap space in 2024) and show these men of will what “will” really is:
$100 million for Darnold
$45 million for Kupp
$32 million for Lawrence
Even if those guys will only get a fraction of those numbers, Kupp got a similar deal to what Dre’Mont received only two years earlier, and Lawrence is a riskier bet (age, injury history) than Pete’s preference to shoot for undervalued players who are 26. Kupp is 32 and Lawrence is 33.
That’s what Schneider did when he had an allowance.
What’s he going to do next year…when he gets a job?
Seahawks 2025 salary cap estimates
The Seahawks entered 2024 with only about $7 million in cap space remaining and then they were able to roll about $8 million over into 2025. Do you know how much Seattle enters 2025 with? It’s this number: