Seahawks still have more draft capital than one team
The secret upside to having no draft capital that helps the Seahawks
The Seahawks have the last pick in every round and they traded half of a day-3 haul for Rashid Shaheed and yet somehow there’s still one team with less draft capital than Seattle:
The Atlanta Falcons.
And boy, that isn’t even the half of how bad this draft has already gone for the Falcons.
According to the NFL salary cap site OvertheCap, the Seahawks have the second-lowest rookie pool (the amount of 2026 cap space that they need to set aside to pay their rookies) and draft capital (the presumed value of every team’s combined draft picks).
The Seahawks only need to pay their 2026 rookie class a combined $6.7 million in cap space … if nothing else changes.
The 7th overall pick in the draft will have a cap hit of $6.8 million in 2026. So Seattle’s entire class takes up less cap space than EACH of the top-7 picks. That is an advantage.
Here are the total rookie pools and first-year cap hits for the teams currently picking in the top-8:
The Jets have a ton of draft capital and that’s good. But they also have to pay those players $24.7 million this season.
If Seattle sticks and picks at 32, they only have to pay that player $3.089 million.
This works out fine for the Jets because they’re an awful team that just traded away most of its talent like Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams so New York has a ton of cap space already. But look at what happens to your salary cap when you shed expensive contracts for good draft picks:
The Seahawks actually have roughly the same amount of “real” cap space as the terrible New York Jets:
What I mean by “real”:
Although the Jets are projected with $79.7 million in cap space and the Seahawks are projected at $63.6 million, the gap is much smaller because the Jets have to pay their rookie draft class about $17 million more this season than Seattle has to pay their rookie class.
Well, if your team sucks like the Jets, you’re okay with taking that risk to pay unproven players that much money because you’re probably able to use those players immediately and you’re okay with it if they’re not very good yet.
Conversely, the Seahawks would love to have the #2 pick (in an alternate universe where they’ve also still just won the Super Bowl) but there’s some downside to that pick too: