The Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl last season with an offense that took 46 minutes and 36 seconds to score its first touchdown against the Patriots. Many of the roster decisions that followed Seattle’s second championship season gave me reasons for pause, but it also felt wrong to question John Schneider’s judgment following a Super Bowl win.
That would be like if I hired Johnny Cochran right after the O.J. trial and he told me to plead guilty to a crime I didn’t commit. I may feel that’s the worst thing I could do, but I’d tell myself that he just won the trial of the century by spittin’ rhymes at the jury so maybe I just need to shut up and take the years.
The most common complaint Seahawks fans will hear about Schneider’s offseason is that the team should have given the Rashid Shaheed money to Kenneth Walker instead and perhaps that’s fair. However, I think we need to stop making everything an “either/or” situation because Seattle would have had plenty of better moves to make without it having to be attached to this one free agent having an MVP caliber season in Kansas City right now.
Because even if Walker was not doing so great with the Chiefs, re-signing Shaheed for $17 million per season would still be a bad move.
This is not an opinion that comes with the gift of hindsight, either. Here’s what I wrote on February 23 — more than two weeks before he re-signed — about the approach the Seahawks should take in their negotiations with Shaheed in free agency:
“Rashid Shaheed’s upside on offense is probably in the range of 400-500 receiving yards, 1-4 touchdowns, and 100-150 rushing yards with 1-2 touchdowns. That’s a total of 500-600 yards with 2-5ish touchdowns + All-Pro return abilities.
Therefore it is only fair to pay Shaheed as a kick returner and the highest-paid player in that field is KaVontae Turpin of the Dallas Cowboys, who signed a three-year, $13.5 million deal with $4.5 million in incentives in 2025.”
Six games into the season, Shaheed is on pace for 460 receiving yards, 110 rushing yards, and 2 touchdowns. He’s not an All-Pro returner so far, and he has fumbled three times.
Yet instead of treating Shaheed like Turpin, as they should have done, the Seahawks gave Shaheed a three-year, $51 million contract and $34 million guaranteed. Schneider paid him $37 million more than I would have wanted to paid him. If Seattle wanted to overpay Shaheed, a three-year, $24 million contract would have made him the highest-paid player of his type in league history; the Seahawks doubled that.
“But what if he turned that down?”
Wait, he can do that? That’s great news! The Seahawks would have saved $51 million to spend somewhere else and as we can plainly see Seattle has a multitude of needs on offense, perhaps most clearly at wide receiver. There were plenty of wide receiver upgrades on the market who would have been affordable if the Seahawks had managed their cap differently.
The Seahawks just lost to two teams in five days that acquired one of those receiver upgrades in the offseason.
Is 20/20 helpful in 2026?
It would not be constructive for me to simply rag on the Seahawks for decisions that have yet to pay off this season, or to just toot my own horn for things I got right while selectively ignoring things I got wrong. I’ve written well over 3,000 newsletters for Seaside Joe and I’ve learned that you can’t just “Nelson Muntz” a bad outcome by pointing at it and saying “Ha Ha.”
So what did we learn from Seattle’s decision to re-sign Rashid Shaheed for too much money?
-Pay for what you’ll get, not what you got
Were it not for Shaheed, the Seahawks may have not won any of these games:
Week 15: Shaheed helps Seattle move into position for game-winning FG vs. Colts
Week 16: Shaheed returns punt for TD to start Seahawks comeback vs. Rams + 31-yard run sets up second TD
NFC Championship: Shaheed 51-yard catch gets this party started in here vs. Rams
Even on Thursday, Shaheed helped the Seahawks force overtime against the Broncos by making a difficult catch for two points and a 31-yard kickoff return to help setup the game-tying field goal. (None of his receiving yards led to points and I think his fumble offsets any of those gains as it almost certainly took points off of the board.)
But you don’t pay a player $51 million because he did you a few favors last year. If I had $17 million for every good deed I’ve ever done in my life, I’d have $8.5 million!
Shaheed was such a predictable low-end WR3 — I didn’t just make those projections up, I calculated them with fair confidence — that it doesn’t really make sense that Seattle would have agreed to $17 million per season if he had just been a free agent from the Saints and never played for the Seahawks. This felt like both a reward for last season and a rare time when John Schneider didn’t adhere to a strict limit of what he would pay somebody.
Why did he get this flexible with Shaheed’s demands but walk Kenneth Walker to the door on his way out?
We may never know. But it’s not too late to make a change.
That’s a Likely Tory
For the first time this season, Tory Horton had the same number of snaps as Shaheed: 39. It’s the first time that Horton has even been close to Shaheed’s playing time. When the Seahawks play the Chiefs next week, I believe it could be the first time Horton out-snaps him.
I know fans feel somewhat decent about Shaheed now because this was his first time showing up in 2026. However, he had a good game against the Colts last season and then he had 88 receiving yards in the next six games, with 51 yards coming on a single catch.
If Shaheed had signed for the number he DESERVED, nobody would mention the contract or compare him to Walker. Because Seattle paid him the number he WANTED, the Seahawks are left trying to prove its a good deal instead of giving those routes to someone else.
I’ll leave you with one last quote from that article:
“Even the best kick returner is only able to provide a small piece of value within that pie. A starting WR deserves a much larger slice and Shaheed is a) too old to be a valuable WR for the next 3 years and b) too inconsequential in this very offense to pay him to be anything more than a 300-yard guy. If Shaheed gives you more than that, great. But it is not going to be that much more than that.
If the price to keep Shaheed is $12 million per season like Rashod Bateman or $10 million like Tutu Atwell or $18 million like Christian Kirk, Seattle’s just throwing money away. As all those teams did when they paid those receivers.”
I didn’t think Schneider was capable of making another team’s mistakes. Not to this degree. Shaheed’s deal is the clearest sign that some cracks are showing, but keep reading and you’ll see four other moves that deserve constructive criticism and a change moving forward to address what went wrong and how to fix it: