Seahawks injured reserve designations: How many can return from IR and when?

Who is returning and what type of farm animal are they?

The Seahawks could designate two players to return from injured reserve next week, if not three or four, including starter Julian Love, key rotational pieces Jarran Reed and Eric Saubert, and special teams STAR Dareke Young. Love and Saubert were eligible to be activated this week but Mike Macdonald said that neither is ready, whereas Reed and Young are eligible to return from missing four games next week against the Falcons.

The topic of IR rules is the first question I address in today’s part 2 of the Super Joes Q&A segment. Read Part I about JSN’s pursuit of Megatron here if you didn’t already.

And in the tradition of the day, THANKS FOR ASKING!

Today is the 7th Thanksgiving in a row that I’ve distracted you while you’re talking to family because Seaside Joe never stops. If you aren’t already, subscribe to Seaside Joe either free or for $5 per month if you’re currently a free subscriber because I go 365 days a year including holidays:

Chuck Turtleman: As we keep putting players on IR seemingly every week, I’m trying to brush up on the league’s rules. From what I’ve read, you can put an unlimited number of players on IR, but can only designate 8 to return during the regular season, plus 2 more if you make the postseason. The rules make enough sense but I’m not sure I follow the reason for a limit. Is there a way a team could somehow game the system if you could allow any number of players to return? I can’t think of any scenarios where a team would want to sit dinged up players for 4 games if they didn’t have to.

Your understanding of the rules is correct. Teams can also IR designate the same player up to 2 times in the same season and I’m not sure how many times that’s happened but it would be really unusual to have to do that 3 times anyway. But it can be really confusing to parse out the rules and how many designations teams have already made — as I found out when I was researching the answer to your question, Chuck — so I was lucky to come across this tracker on Pro Football Rumors:

My understanding is that you can put players on IR throughout the season and then you basically declare your 8 activations as they happen, so right now the Seahawks have 2 players on IR who are eligible to be activated — Julian Love and Eric Saubert — and 2 players who have already been activated, Robbie Ouzts and Christian Haynes.

Next week, Jarran Reed and Dareke Young will join Love and Saubert as being eligible to return.

So why the limit? I think the answer is baked into the results: It’s not all that common for a team to need more than 8 activations, or 10 including playoffs.

One attempt at an explanation I’ve read is that teams could stash players on IR to open up a 53-man roster spot for a free agent and if you had unlimited opportunities to do this how egregious would this strategy be? I’m not sure how much I believe that but the NFL does have a limit so there must be some reason. It could just be that the NFL is slowly ramping up to unlimited designation because it used to be that if you went on IR you had to miss the entire season, then it became that you could designate 1 player, now you can designate up to 8.

The only teams with fewer than 4 activations remaining are the Cowboys (2 left), Chargers (3), and Vikings (3). There are only 5 more weeks left to even make a regular season activation, so the NFL could simply avoid any controversy by arguing that there’s no reason for unlimited activations because “You barely even use the ones we give you”.

I think we’ll probably see the league stick to 8 until a team can prove that the limit gave them an unfair disadvantage and then they’d still need to get the majority of the league owners to approve a rule change.

Will the Seahawks hit 8? Maybe. I’d expect the team at least hopes to return Love, Saubert, Reed, Young, Jalen Sundell, and Tory Horton. That makes eight but Seattle could return 2 more in the playoffs, like Chazz Surratt. I guess we’ll have to circle back at the end of the season to see if they maxed out.

Don Ellis: Uchenna Nwosu seems to have bounced back and is playing solid ball this year. Given his cap hit of around $20 million for 2026 and he is still in his prime at 28 years old, do you think JS extends Nwosu, cuts Nwosu or rides out the contract? Obviously his injury history is a consideration.

Well, I’ll start by repeating what you said at the end: Uchenna Nwosu has to stay healthy for six more games and playoffs. And if he does, is he going to hit a wall? Nwosu has played 390 total snaps this season, which is only 83 fewer snaps than his playing time over the past two years combined.

And by the way, Nwosu didn’t play 400 defensive snaps in any of his first three seasons in the league either:

So let’s see what the conversation about Nwosu looks like in January before committing one way or the other, especially with his 29th birthday coming up at the end of this year.

If at the point the Seahawks feel like Nwosu is an important player to keep long-term, an extension could bring down his cap number a bit (maybe $5-$7 million?) but it means being committed to him in 2027, at least. Can I foresee a lot of situations where Uchenna Nwosu has played all of 2025, all of 2026, and all of 2027?

I would say that if the team is parting ways with Boye Mafe and is worried about Demarcus Lawrence’s age (35 next season), ride out Nwosu’s contract and draft an edge rusher in 2026. He’s already been banged up a couple of times this year, I’d be wary of expecting 34+ games out of him in 2026-2027.

Scott M: Old (sarcastic) Macdonald had a farm (or at least a BARNYARD) E-I-E-I-O...and on that farm he had a Big Cat (Leonard Williams) and a dog (K9 Kenneth Walker) E-I-E-I-O...my question for you Kenneth, in this scenario which players would you assign to which animals? Keeping in mind some farms have some very exotic animals.

Farm-wise + exotic animals:

Riq Woolen is a snake…

I know snakes have negative connotations but in this case I don’t really mean it that way. This season on Survivor, a player was bitten by one of the most venomous snakes in the world and evacuated, but was OK because it was a “dry bite” meaning that the snake didn’t release any venom. Woolen reminds me a bit of that snake bite: Sometimes deadly, sometimes not. You can’t really know until you test it.

Devon Witherspoon is a chicken…

Again, not meant as a criticism. Chickens are known for being “chatty” and Witherspoon is considered one of the most boisterous defensive players in the league. A chicken also has many uses. That being said, I wouldn’t mind seeing Witherspoon turn into one of those giant roosters now and again. Less chirp, more peck.

Jaxon Smith-Njigba would be my pig…

Why does every animal sound like an insult? My understanding is that pigs are the smartest animals on a farm, if not one of the smartest species on the planet. Some people think they want a guard dog (DK Metcalf) when in fact they’d be better off with a pig.

By the way, today I found out that cows are ball players:

Maybe that’s A.J. Barner?

Share your own animal answers in the comments:

Bret: I’d appreciate any thoughts or analysis regarding what seems to be an inability to “close out,” or “finish off,” lesser teams. I feel like the year has been our team charging furiously out of the gate and fading before limping our way through the end of the game.

Because you’ve already effectively debunked the concept of outcome-dispositive halftime adjustments, what is left to explain this Jekyll and Hyde performance that I observe? Or am I mistaken regarding a disparity between first and second half effectiveness?

For me, I look at the Seahawks being ranked third in point differential (Rams +127, Colts +112, Seahawks +107) and I ask myself if it’s really all that common for teams to do what we’re asking of Seattle, which is to just blow out every mediocre team by 30 points. Or do they just blow out a few teams and the rest of the games are close regardless of opponent quality?

This reminds me of the Lions last season. They went 15-2 and they had about 5 of those types of wins that we want to see from the Seahawks, just imposing their will on other teams and winning 52-14 or 52-6…sometimes even very good teams like the Vikings, 31-9. What happened? They lost in the playoffs with a whimper.

My thoughts on the matter are probably going to be unsatisfactory: I just think that’s football at the NFL level. Players and coaches are too good to put away as often as we see in college. Yeah Seattle has shot themselves in the foot too many times, but look at the Titans last week and that was the perfect example of a really bad team proving that even the worst team has talent. (Usually)

zezinhom400: Would be fun to see an all time “Humble Pie Guy” ranking — guys who left their teams for greener pastures, only to a) do worse in their new surroundings and b) have their replacement outplay them in their old surroundings. Seattle has three candidates right out of the blocks: Wilson to Denver, replaced by Geno; Geno to Oakland, replaced by Darnold (this is my #1 “Humble Pie Guy” out of my short list); DK to Steelers, replaced by JSN

I think you hit the nail on the head with all 3. A throwback answer could be Joey Galloway. I wonder how those Mike Holmgren era offenses would have looked with Galloway as a WR1. Galloway was kind of a bust in Dallas but rebounded with the Buccaneers in 2005, right when the Seahawks were the number one offense in the league.

Sidenote: Galloway didn’t hit his career-high until he was 34! I don’t even think the NFL would allow a receiver to stay in the league past 31 if he wasn’t producing.

Post your own Humble Pie Guys in the comments:

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