Seahawks' offensive starters: 2023 salary cap rankings
Seattle has the NFL's cheapest o-line, will it allow them to pay a QB? Seaside Joe 1445
Though the conversations around the Seattle Seahawks and money right now are centering on Geno Smith—rightfully so—there’s no attention being paid to how Seattle could even be in a position to pay any quarterback. It’s because John Schneider and Pete Carroll saw this moment coming when they traded Russell Wilson and made their draft picks in 2022.
No, they did not expect to be contemplating a franchise tag or a long-term extension for Geno—if that was the case, the Seahawks wouldn’t have let him linger on the free agent market for a month and then hold an open quarterback competition until the final week of the preseason—but Pete and John knew that they were setting the foundation for a new beginning in 2023.
And how do you do that? Get your offensive line right.
Just as it was in 2010 with Russell Okung, then 2011 with James Carpenter and John Moffitt (nice try, nice effort), Pete and John did the right thing by building a car before finding and hiring a driver: Charles Cross and Abe Lucas as the foundational bookends at tackle. Add in Ken Walker III as a bit of gas money and the Seahawks were putting the pieces in place for a franchise quarterback in 2023 or 2024.
Whether or not they actually believe that Geno Smith has done enough to prove worthy of that title is not a question that anyone can answer outside of Pete and John. And I don’t know, maybe Dave Canales.
Now Seattle has unprecedented draft capital and another chance to keep adding upgrades to the car, to start preparing a driver, or to try and do both. But it all starts and ends with their resources and the Seahawks’ options are a little bit more open because of the first-year success of Cross and Lucas; Seattle doesn’t need offensive tackles and neither are among the top-20 in salary for their positions in 2023.
Do they want savings at quarterback or do they want to cash in on what cash they have for a run right now?
This is a look at where the Seahawks projected starters on offense are ranked in salary cap hits for 2023. For positions without guaranteed starters, a projection of Seattle’s options moving forward.
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QB - $0
Rank: 5th-30th
The Seahawks have no quarterbacks signed for 2023, so the range in salary cap hit is as wide as possible: Either Seattle goes ultra-cheap again, as they did in 2022 while having to pay Russell Wilson’s dead cap hit, or they pay the $32.4 million for Geno Simth on the franchise tag.