Seahawks exclusive rights free agents

Ty Okada and George Holani are easy decisions

There are three levels of free agents:

Unrestricted free agents: Hardest to negotiate with because they are free to do what they want.

Restricted free agents: While there are rarely negotiations, teams must contend with how much they value these players by which tag they decide to use on them.

Exclusive rights free agents: Easy-peezy.

An exclusive rights free agent is any player with fewer than three accrued seasons (the player was on full-play status for at least six games and reported to training camp) who does not have a contract. Essentially because draft picks sign four-year contracts, they rarely become exclusive rights free agents.

So usually these players are undrafted free agents who played their way into being important members of the 53-man roster. The Seahawks only have two such players on the roster and both will be easy decisions.

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S Ty Okada

Despite going undrafted in 2023, Okada enters the offseason with not two, not three, but just one accrued season in the NFL meaning that he should be an exclusive rights free agent again in 2027.

That is unless the Seahawks feel like he’s earned a better deal after such an impressive first season as a starter in 2025.

Okada, whose great-great-grandfather was Japanese and came into the United States through the port of Seattle…

Earned his way up as a walk-on at Montana State in 2017 and then a few years later his coaches awarded him as the Special Teams Player of the Year for the team, prior to then becoming the best player on the defense as a safety.

Okada signed with the Seahawks as an undrafted free agent in 2023 (he was actually one of two Montana State players to sign with Seattle alongside James Campbell) and Okada said that Pete Carroll’s staff loved his story of overcoming odds as a walk-on:

“It's actually been fun having the conversation with some of the Seahawks coaches that have been calling me and just making the statement like, I know exactly how to handle business," Okada explained. "I've been in this position before, and they love that. I think they could tell that in my character early on, and that's why I think this relationship is going to grow and flourish.”

He appeared in five games as a rookie for Carroll, then Mike Macdonald hung onto Okada as a practice squad player in 2024, eventually calling him up for four games.

At that point, Okada could have easily been one of dozens of former Seattle practice squad players who we forget about soon after they gone (imagine how many names I could throw out right now and you’d go “ohhh yeahhhhh” like Vi Jones) but now he’s proven to be a better starting safety in Macdonald’s Seahawks defense than even a high-paid veteran like Rayshawn Jenkins.

“Ohhh yeahhhh….”

Okada played in 66% of Seattle’s defensive snaps and finished with 65 tackles, one interception, six passes defensed, 1.5 sacks, one fumble recovery, and was cited as the closest-defender on three touchdowns but only was blamed for three missed tackles; Okada’s missed tackle rate of 4.4% is absurdly better than Coby Bryant’s 21.4%.

Very easy move here: Keep Okada as a ERFA (about $1 million) and that gives you a lot of options for who should be competing to start with Julian Love in 2026. Maybe that’s Okada, maybe it’s not (he didn’t play a defensive snap in the Super Bowl), but he won’t be on the practice squad again any time soon.

RB George Holani

I have this memory of Gabe Kaplan in an interview saying that the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter would always invite John Travolta out to dinners and parties but he would refuse because he wanted to focus on becoming a big movie star. Maybe that’s true or maybe it’s exaggerated or maybe I just made the whole thing up, but that has always stuck with me because there’s a great lesson in there about making sacrifices so that one day you’re “John Travolta” instead of “Gabe Kaplan”.

(It could be very good to become Gabe Kaplan and certainly there’s something off with John Travolta, but I think you get the point and the moral of the story anyway.)

For most people, Welcome Back, Kotter is simply “that show that John Travolta used to be on” meaning that most of the actors are merely people who used to work with Travolta. Similar to how most of the cast of E.R. were people who used to act with George Clooney.

This is probably something that we can all relate to on some level. Maybe you went to high school with Bruce Springsteen or used to shop at the same grocery store as Olivia Newton-John. I don’t know. But many of us will tell stories to people we just about about how we had a loose association to somebody who became famous and rarely talk about the hundreds more who didn’t.

I say all of this because it’s physically impossible for me to think about George Holani without immediately thinking about Ashton Jeanty.

So Holani, a native of New Zealand, played running back at St John Bosco in California, cited at the time as “the best high school team in the country”, and commits to Boise State in 2018.

He rushed for a very impressive 1,014 yards as a true freshman, seemingly setting himself up for life until he suffers a torn MCL in 2020 and goes through the first real setback of his career. Following a ho-hum 569-yard season by Holani in nine games in 2021, Boise State recruits a 3-star “slot receiver” who they decide might make a really good running back.

That player is obviously Jeanty.

Although Holani bounced back for a team-leading 1,157 yards in 2022, Jeanty adds over 800 yards on his own and proves to be a special talent who won’t be denied, not even by Holani. Jeanty took the starting role from Holani in 2023, possibly being the cause for him to go undrafted in 2024.

I mean, if Holani is the starting running back for the Broncos as a senior, maybe he is at least a day three pick.

Holani’s good, but Jeanty (who rushed for 2,601 yards and 29 touchdowns the season after Holani left) is just better. He was the best running back in the country. He was one of the best college running backs of all-time.

On Seattle’s side, Jeanty pushing out Holani worked out great. He signed with the Seahawks in 2024 and appeared in just five games as a rookie meaning that he did not accrue a season. Holani just accrued his first season in 2025, appearing in 11 games and rushing for 73 yards on 22 carries with a touchdown.

Following Zach Charbonnet’s torn ACL against the 49ers, Holani would then appear in a career-high 23 snaps in the NFC Championship before a new career-high 24 snaps in the Super Bowl.

He can block, he can run routes, he’s the ideal undrafted third down running back. He can also return kicks, but he’s not Rashid Shaheed.

It’s a cut-and-dry decision to keep Holani and the odds are very good that he’ll be on the Week 1 roster given his experience with the team and Charbonnet’s injury. Let’s just hope the Seahawks announce his contract by having John Travolta try to say “Holani” on a live TV.

Seaside Joe 2546