Ranking the Seahawks who Bob Condotta 'cut' for his 53-man roster projection
Seaside Joe 1990
How painful is it when you find out who the Seahawks are cutting from their roster every year? Probably not as bad as you thought it was going to be, and certainly the meaningfulness of final cuts typically gets less and less serious as time goes on. The reality of who is cut almost never reaches the hype and reaction to that player getting cut.
Coaches will tell you that 53 is not enough. My eyes and Pro-Football-Reference tell me that 53 and a practice squad is more than most teams need, at least in terms of keeping all the players you brought to camp who actually have more value than the replacement players that teams churn through every season.
Case in point: The Seahawks parted with 23 players at final cuts in 2023 and including the six who are still with Seattle today, none have had a significant impact in a regular season NFL game yet.
It’s possible that any of their respective values could improve in the future—someone like Patrick O’Connell or Ty Okada could make the Seahawks roster this year after falling short last year—but most impactful players on NFL roster enter training camp with some sort of cache such as being drafted, being signed as a free agent, being traded for, or even simply not being cut in the past.
Take a player like Jake Bobo for example: He may not have been drafted but he’s now established himself as an undrafted free agent who made a 53-man roster as a rookie and had an impact in the regular season. Compare this to Myles Adams, another undrafted free agent who always has a good reputation during training camp and preseason, but one who Seattle is essentially comfortable with releasing because he always comes back.
It’s like on the reality show Big Brother, every week two houseguests are nominated for eviction. You might not worry about being nominated that week if the person sitting next to you is guaranteed to be evicted, but the side effect of sitting on the block is that now people see you as an easy nomination because you’ve already been there.
As it goes in Big Brother, so it goes in life: You don’t want to be the player who the team feels is an “easy” cut because “he’ll just revert to our practice squad if we want him back”.
That’s one of the reasons why Adams didn’t make Bob Condotta’s latest 53-man roster projection for The Seattle Times, even though he did finally make Seattle’s final roster in 2022 and 2023:
“And that potential could get him the nod for a final spot here ahead of Myles Adams, who would again be an obvious practice squad candidate.”
Since going undrafted out of Rice in 2020, Adams has been cut by the Panthers, and cut a couple more times by the Seahawks. To cut Adams now doesn’t seem to bother nearly as many people as it did a year or two ago when it felt like Adams might be a diamond in the rough. Instead, Mike Morris takes precedent over Adams for most people (and Condotta) despite only having one career game because in addition to being three years younger and someone with prior experience playing for Mike Macdonald, he was a 2023 draft pick.
Ultimately though, Adams and Morris are both football players living dangerously close to the border between “valuable enough to continue their careers” and “holding onto hope with the practice squad” with final cuts only two weeks away.
To illustrate this point, I’ve ranked the 37 current members of the Seahawks who did NOT make Condotta’s final 53-man roster projection. Because I find this exercise to be much more useful than me simply making a 3% different final 53-man roster projection and calling it “my own”.
No, I’d much rather do it the Seaside Joe way, which is to emphasize through historical records just how much more inconsequential these cuts are in terms of winning football games compared to how significant cuts “feel” to us in the moment. It’s not intended to be a knock on these players to say that they’re replaceable and often forgettable, anymore than it would be a knock to say that most movies have 2-3 stars and 47 other actors.
You’re all valuable members of the project en route to the end goal, it’s just that some will be on the red carpet and most won’t.
Red carpet events are boring anyway.
Before we rank the players, here are probably the best players who were cut by the Seahawks in recent years:
2023 - S Joey Blount?
2022 - WR Bo Melton
2021 - S Damarious Randall
2020 - S Ryan Neal, WR Paul Richardson (after his career was over)
By the way, in 2019 the Seahawks did cut Geno Smith, but only as a roster move so that they could bring him back a couple days later. Still, Seattle had no problem risking Geno as a loss five years ago if another team wanted him.
*Justin Coleman was cut in 2022, but returned right after that so that he could close out his career with 12 games as a reserve.
A notable cut is usually just a name we know from the past who doesn’t have anything left in the tank. Very few young players like Neal or maybe Melton will turn out to have some value, and Neal of course still continued his career with Seattle after being cut in 2020.
If you’re a player who gets cut by an NFL team this year, that sucks. It really does. But it’s rarely unexpected. Even the players who just barely make it off of the bubble like last year’s surprise Cody Thompson, could just be getting a temporary stay. (Thompson went between the roster and the practice squad and is currently with the Bucs, which is remarkably his sixth training camp and therefore he’s a different kind of inspirational success story.)
These players did not make Condotta’s final 53-man roster projection—which again, you can read here—and this is my attempt to rank them. Could any of these names come back to haunt the Seahawks if they do get cut: