Is this an 'all-in' year for Seahawks?

Why would a salary cap expert see 2025 as "the wheels falling off" in Seattle? Seaside Joe 1984

No, I do not think it is. I’m sure none of you think it is either. So why ask?

I was listening to the Spotrac podcast on Tuesday and that’s what both of the voices were saying on this week’s show. On one hand, they both said that the Seahawks were underrated going into the season and that Seattle could be a much better team that people expect. On the other, they both mostly agreed that the Seahawks should have a sense of urgency to win in 2024 because Seattle is in danger of taking a big step back in 2025.

“Seattle feels like they’re one and done. So that’s a good pick (for a team that could surprise this year) because the wheels will fall off next year if they do not at least, I think, capitalize on some things, right?”

As you know, we talk about the Seahawks here 365.25 days per year and I do not think I have ever heard or seen this insinuated by anyone else. I don’t take offense to someone saying something about the Seahawks that I don’t currently agree with at this moment, I just want to know why the salary cap experts podcast feels this way about the team.

Let’s take an objective look at the Seahawks from 2024 to 2025 and then we can give a collective grade to Spotrac’s assessment of this as an “all-in year” for Seattle.

ICYMI: 6 revelations from Seahawks first depth chart of 2024

ICYMI: Who is winning position battles at C and G?

Seahawks 2025 roster decisions

I actually use OvertheCap, not Spotrac, 98% of the time. That’s also where I’m getting this screenshot, but the numbers are going to be basically the same at either website. When you see this red -$25.6 million in 2025, that’s obviously going to be concerning to Seahawks fans:

But the cap space isn’t a problem. Actually, if anything, Seattle being a great team this year would probably make it more likely that the Seahawks run into roster building issues next year, not less likely? I think?

As I wrote in May, the Seahawks have $120 million salary cap decisions in 2025. A much simpler breakdown of the majority of that $120 million is:

1-Geno Smith, $25m cap savings

2-DK Metcalf, $22m cap savings

3-Tyler Lockett, $17m cap savings

4-Dre’Mont Jones, $11.5 million cap savings

5-Noah Fant, $9m cap savings

6-Uchenna Nwosu, $8.5m cap savings

There are more names to talk about, but that’s already a lot of cap dough. Not to be confused with a dough cap:

Two decisions that could be relatively easy would be Lockett (who might retire) and Jones, which immediately puts the Seahawks back in the black. And if the Seahawks still like Geno in 2025, they will probably do a contract deal to bring down his $38.5 million cap hit; if they do not like Geno as much by then, that’s another $25 million in cap savings to part ways.

As inflexible as Seattle’s cap is today, it’s as flexible as anyone could ask for in 2025 because of enormous non-guaranteed base salaries for these players, plus $20 million for Leonard Williams, who they could restructure to save up to $9 million.

If the premise is that the Seahawks are facing a potential nightmare in 2025 because of cap problems, I don’t anticipate that being the case because Seattle’s nowhere near the type of nightmare that the 49ers are facing right now. And any players that they might need to part ways with for cap savings would probably be addition by subtraction. The only one who might not be would be DK Metcalf, if the Seahawks are open to trading him because of a contract extension needing to get done, but Seattle actually looks very prepared for that too.

The Seahawks have other receivers capable of soaking up those targets because of who they added in 2023 (Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Jake Bobo) and the $22 million in cap savings in addition to whatever Seattle gets in return for Metcalf could ultimately make the team better, not worse.

So is the problem not cap space, but potential personnel losses?

Seahawks 2025 free agents

With the caveat that this is still before the season and we don’t know what breakouts are about to happen, I think the Seahawks already have all of their critical players under contract for 2025. They do, however, have a lot of players in important roles hitting the market in 2025 and those players will need to be retained or replaced.

Expected starters or guys getting regular snaps hitting free agency: LB Jerome Baker, LB Tyrel Dodson, LG Laken Tomlinson, DT Jarran Reed, DT Johnathan Hankins, CB Michael Jackson, CB Tre Brown, TE Pharoah Brown, OLB Darrell Taylor

These are not ALL of the Seahawks free agents, but certainly the ones expected to have big roles, assuming that they all make the team and it’s not set in stone that they all will just yet. (Taylor maybe closest to the danger zone.)

So while the Seahawks do need to save $25 million to be cap compliant (which is only an estimate, so the 2025 cap could end up going up by much more than the expectation), they definitely can’t go into free agency with only $0-$10 million in room. They’ll need more like $30-$40 million in room. That feels like a lot, $60ish million worth of moves, but I refer you back to the previous section: It could ultimately only take three or four moves, although once you decide to cut Geno (for example), you still need to replace him with another QB.

If a couple of these pending free agents turn out to be awesome, like Jerome Baker and Tre Brown for example, that would mean these are expensive players to keep. But the first year of a new contract usually carries a low cap hit and Seattle actually has a lot of cap space in 2026, 2027 because they haven’t drafted many players worth keeping recently.

As of me writing this, we don’t know if Connor Williams will sign with the Seahawks, but if he’s as good as his agent keeps saying he is, it sounds like he’d be asking for over $10 million per year. We’ll cross that bridge if and when Seattle does.

Ultimately, I don’t see much of an issue here with regards to Seahawks 2025 salary situation + Seahawks 2025 outgoing free agents + Seahawks needing to replace the players who they part ways with in 2025.

I don’t find that to be a problem, so could it be that the Spotrac podcast was referring to making another decision on Geno Smith in 2025?

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Geno Smith

Ownership, head coach, general manager, quarterback. These are the four most important components to having a foundation for your franchise that could sustain success for a long time.

The Seahawks do not have any apparent plans to change ownership in 2025, although we can’t make any guarantees about that…certainly Spotrac wouldn’t know. Mike Macdonald just got here and he was called by most as the first or second-best hire of the cycle. Although that’s just a perception of something that isn’t knowable on the first day of the news, we’d be shocked if Macdonald wasn’t set in place for at least a few years. John Schneider also kind of “just got here” and the Seahawks seem to be excited by the idea of letting him run the team for a while without any input from Pete Carroll to see what that’s like.

The quarterback is really the only piece in Seattle that not everybody agrees will stick around in 2025, so could they be talking about “try to win now with Geno Smith” as the reason for an all-in? I doubt that too.

If Geno has a career year with Ryan Grubb, then great, the Seahawks can go into 2025 without having to solve the most difficult problem in the NFL of finding a starting quarterback for the next season.

If Geno has a bad year and the Seahawks decide to part way, Seattle’s going to get $25 million in cap space and have the flexibility to attack the issue of finding a good starting quarterback by selling players on the premise of playing within an offense that should have most of the other compenents ready to go. The only teams in the NFC who have the same starting quarterback that they had in 2020 are the Cowboys, Giants, and Cardinals.

Based on those three situations, it’s possible no 2025 team in the NFC will have had the same starting quarterback that they had in 2020. The longest-tenured NFC starters would be Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford, having been traded for another in 2021, and Jalen Hurts.

Teams change QBs more often now than ever before in history. It would probably be more likely that the Seahawks would replace Geno Smith by 2026 than to still have him just based on how common it is now for teams to change QBs. That’s not even commentary on how good Geno is—since 2021, Stafford, Russell Wilson, Goff, Aaron Rodgers, Kirk Cousins, Deshaun Watson, and several other starting quarterbacks have all changed teams—that’s just modern NFL since Tom Brady went to the Bucs in 2020.

All of which is to say that the Seahawks are not even a “quarterback franchise” and anyone who thinks Seattle believes they need a player like Dak Prescott or a number one draft pick to win a Super Bowl doesn’t fully understand the Seahawks. For a full explanation if you missed it, I wrote about the Seahawks QB history earlier in the offseason.

We expected Geno Smith to be worse than Russell Wilson, he really wasn’t (at that point of Wilson’s career). People said that Wilson would be a hilariously bad choice to start in 2012 as a third round rookie, he wasn’t. So whatever the Seahawks do at quarterback next year, same or something different, we can’t assume a probable outcome of what will happen and expect to be right.

2024 is “Audition”, not “All-In”

“All-In” being a poker term for when a player stakes their entire bankroll on a single hand, let’s stick in that world of analogies for what the Seahawks are actually planning to get out of the 2024 season. They’re not pushing all their chips in with Geno and the 2024 roster, they’re more like a poker player who is sitting on their stack and trying to blend in until they get a really great hand. Or better yet, an unexplainable hot streak.

You can’t get to your hot streak if you blow your stack in the first ten minutes.

Instead, Seattle seems to be okay with reading their opponents, looking for tells, waiting for the 49ers and Rams to go “on tilt” (one bad beat leads to a series of horrible decisions, which could be playing out in San Francisco), and only hitting the gas with their resources once they know which players deserve it…and which ones don’t.

I think the general consensus among Seaside Joe readers and commenters in the community this year since the Seahawks fired Carroll and hired Macdonald is that if the Seahawks win a lot of games, that’s awesome, but if the Seahawks miss the playoffs, that’s acceptable as long as the team shows improvement. Actually, I specifically asked you what consituted “success” for Mike Macdonald all the way back on February 8 and here were some answers:

Nicholas Donsky: Success for me would start with opening cap space by getting rid of all the overpaid players on the team and using FA and the draft for a QB, Safety, Nose tackle, athletic LB, and interior Oline.

Hawkman54: Hopefully ( I believe it will) it is with getting better up front on both sides of the ball! They can be very good next year with a few really good moves and Draft!

Khammarling: By Week 18 have the team showing what it's identity on the field is. Be within reach of the playoffs going into Week 16/17. And overall display those early signs of progression we lacked under Carroll.

Chris H: In year 1 I'd be happy with just establishing what this team is all about. What are we about on offense? What are we about on defense? If that starts to become clear, and it makes sense, then I'll take that as a win in year 1.

Dale: What is it with the 3 year thing? It seems a few people are looking to that. I think 3 years would be warp speed for a new coach to win a SB. Not that I’d complain if it happens of course. It just seems a bit of a hard task and maybe a bit unfair (& a lot of pressure).

These are just five of a lot great comments on that post, most of which centered around the Seahawks being competitive in year one as an acceptable measure of success, with years two and three being far more important as far as having Super Bowl aspirations. Seahawks fans are more than prepared to be patient with the team: You waited 30 years for a Super Bowl appearance and almost 40 for the first championship. So it makes sense to me that most Seattle fans (many of whom have also stuck by THE MARINERS) would find, “Please just make a tackle” as an acceptable measure of success in year one.

ICYMI: 6 revelations from Seahawks first depth chart of 2024

ICYMI: Who is winning position battles at C and G?

That also seems to be what all of the Seahawks moves this year would imply:

Keeping Pete Carroll would have seemed like the “all-in” move, not replacing him with a first-time head coach half his age. Re-signing Jordyn Brooks and Bobby Wagner seems less complicated and more immediate than a willingness to start over at linebacker with players who are inexperienced or coming off of serious injuries. Handing the offense over to a coordinator who has never worked in the NFL before is long-term, not short-sighted.

The look of the 2024 Seahawks is one of a team that will probably look surprisingly different at the end of the season than in Week 1 merely out of a need to test players with new/radically-different coaches on both sides of the ball, not all of whom are going to succeed and will need to be replaced. If not during the season, then definitely after the season. They do NOT feel like a team that fits this description:

“Seattle feels like they’re one and done…The wheels will fall off next year if they do not at least, I think, capitalize on some things, right?”

Saying that the wheels could fall off implies that the wheels are on and the Seahawks wouldn’t have made such massive changes to their organizational philosophy and direction this year if ownership felt as though the team was comfortably speeding down the highway of football. Instead, 2024 is intended to get the Seahawks back on the road, with 2025 as a viable year to be formidable again, making 2026 or even 2027 as the earliest possible time for any wheels to fall off.

The Seahawks can’t fall apart until they get themselves together, and they can’t go all-in until they get their chips first.