How the big salary cap news impacts the Seahawks

Jordyn Brooks, Leonard Williams, Geno Smith futures any different now? Seaside Joe 1819

I think at times, for some, there can be a tendency to take all the news and put it through a filter that makes it fit “What I want to happen”. At Seaside Joe, I’ll try to never make the news fit into a box of “This confirms what I predicted” or “This is what I want to happen.”

Seaside Joe is: This IS the news. Or this is what I THINK could happen.

I’ll tell you what I think will happen with the DK Metcalf contract situation in 2022, which turned out to be 100% accurate. Or I’ll tell you who I think will win a QB competition between Geno Smith and Drew Lock, which was proven false and incorrect.

What I “want” to happen for the Seahawks is typically kept separate from Seaside Joe and when it does, I’ll specifically note that “This is not news or a prediction, but a desire”. I don’t want the Seahawks to be involved in a Justin Fields trade—and I also predict that they won’t be—but just to be clear that there is a conflict of interest there. The conflict: I’m not interested.

Now let’s apply these rules to Friday’s big news about the salary cap.

On Friday, the NFL announced that there will be a $255.4 million salary cap in 2024, which is an increase of more than $30 million over 2023 and about $13 million more than what experts have been projecting for the last year. This is great news for the Seahawks, as the previous projection had them over the 2024 salary cap and the new one actually starts them off with $13 million in cap space.

It is good that the Seahawks have more room to spend money right now. It is also bad that other teams got the same increase, which specifically for Mike Macdonald means that he might not be able to poach a player from the Baltimore Ravens that he was expecting to be on the cusp of their decision-making process with their long list of free agents.

Ultimately though, I don’t think this salary cap news would or should change any of Seattle’s decisions with regards to their own players including Jordyn Brooks, Leonard Williams, or Geno Smith.

You may want those players and others to be re-signed or not-traded, which could be perfectly reasonable, but I see this increase as more of an opportunity for the Seahawks to re-think the draft and outside free agents. Though I’m already flinching at the thought of John Schneider directly contradicting my statement after Seattle re-signs Leonard Williams to an $80 million deal because it’s happened before, I’ll explain why I don’t think the increase will impact any of the decisions that the Seahawks have already made.

If you are not subscribed to Seaside Joe at all, enter your email in the box below to get a DAILY newsletter about your favorite football team. If you are already a subscriber getting at least 20 free articles per month, consider supporting the writer with a bargain-basement deal of $5 per month or $55 per year or upgrade to Super Joes here:

Seahawks decisions not made by salary cap, but by individual prices

In case you missed it, I did post my thoughts on all of Seattle’s unrestricted and restricted free agents here on Thursday, which essentially came down to “No”. It is my opinion that the Seahawks would not be anxious to re-sign Jordyn Brooks because of his underwhelming returns as a former first round pick, coupled with the potential for another team to over-pay him due to his experience and athleticism.

Jordyn Brooks - ‘above average’ only, maybe?

Essentially, I could see Brooks coming back after free agency begins if it turns out that his market wasn’t as robust as he expected, but if the Seahawks were that enamored with him through three seasons they should have picked up his fifth-year option in 2023 even knowing that he was recovering from a torn ACL.

If it were Bobby Wagner after his third season—and he missed five games that year by the way—there’s no question that Seattle would have picked up his fifth-year option and they probably would have just extended him outright.

Leonard Williams - Does he fill a Macdonald need that can’t be had for much cheaper?

In the case of Leonard Williams, I had to change the stance I’ve had since the Seahawks traded for him at midseason. I felt the second round pick was a worthy sacrifice if Williams was re-signed, but circumstances changed when Pete Carroll was fired and now we have to ask what Macdonald wants in the position. Furthermore, paying $18-$22 million per season for a 30-year-old defensive lineman who is only going to give you 3-5 sacks and was already on the worst run defense in the NFL last year (Williams was on arguably the two worst run defenses in the league), it feels like the least we need to do is step back and ask ourselves, “Are we overpaying to justify the trade?”

The defensive tackles we see command that kind of money are either All-Pros or signing a second contract in their mid-20s. Williams is neither of those, so if contract projections of $18 million+ per season are to be believed I think the Seahawks have to let him go to free agency unless Macdonald is adament that he can’t possibly find a player like him and that he’s in a very important role.

When I look at the Ravens defensive line last season, I don’t see a single high-paid/large investment player on the entire unit: Justin Madubuike was a third round pick who Macdonald elevated into an All-Pro, leading a group of journeyman like Michael Pierce, Travis Jones, Broderick Washington, and Brent Urban.

Macdonald now inherits a roster that already has Dre’Mont Jones, Jarran Reed, Cameron Young, and Myles Adams under contract (Adams has to be tendered) with one of those players making $17 million per season.

Salary cap increase shouldn’t lead to playing faster and looser

Essentially I bring up these two players and decisions because I don’t see how the Seahawks should change how much they’re willing to pay them based on how high the salary cap is: It’s not as though John Schneider’s going to say, “Well, let me overpay Williams and Brooks now that I can.”

I came to the conclusion that Seattle was more likely than not to let Brooks and Williams test free agency because individually I expect them to want more money than the Seahawks are going to offer them. Not because I didn’t think the Seahawks could afford them; Seattle has ALWAYS been able to keep the players who they want to keep, regardless of the salary cap.

That’s the most important takeaway: Under Pete Carroll’s regime at least, the Seahawks have always kept the players they want to keep…TO A FAULT. Their desire to keep players like Doug Baldwin, Kam Chancellor, Marshawn Lynch on third contracts was if anything bad business. But there were never free agents “who got away” when Seattle didn’t want them to leave.

The closest example I could even think of is Byron Maxwell and I don’t even think the Seahawks wanted to keep him, at least not at the price that others were willing to pay.

If the Seahawks want to keep Williams and Brooks, the plan for how to do that was made for a $242 million salary cap just the same as a $255 million salary cap. Schneider knows how to plan ahead for keeping those players.

I just think that in Brooks’ case, we have no way of knowing how important Schneider thinks he is to the team other than to go off of context clues like not getting the fifth-year option and not being extended after he proved he could return from a torn ACL. The Seahawks could have extended Brooks in December, as they’ve done with many players, and they didn’t do that.

In Williams’ case, it is possible that the team traded for him with an intention to re-sign him, which I think they even said outright once or twice, but that the plan changed when Carroll was fired. Or that Carroll pushed for a rental because he truly believed that Seattle was going to make the playoffs, which we know that he did.

The salary cap could be $300 million and it wouldn’t change that the Seahawks are still going to sign the outgoing free agents who they always planned to re-sign. In the case of all the defensive free agents, I don’t see them as being irreplaceable with players who are cheaper and younger, but there is actually another barrier in Seattle’s way because of the salary cap increase…

Players are going to want more money!

The players heard the same news about the salary cap as the GMs did, by the way, and almost none of them are thinking about how it impacts a team’s ability to sign more players. They’re thinking about how it impacts their own ability to get more money on their own next contract.

The salary cap went down an historic amount in 2021 because of the 2020 pandemic, but it has skyrocketed since then because it had to rebound and we just heard that more people watched the Super Bowl than ever. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen Aaron Donald get $31.6m per year ($7.5m more than the next-highest DT), Nick Bosa get $34m per year ($6m more than next-highest EDGE), and Joe Burrow get $55m per year.

What if yesterday Brooks’ agent was asking for $10 million per season and today he’s increased the asking price to $12 million per season? Isn’t that actually what we would expect to happen?

I doubt that today’s news has teammates texting each other, “Hey isn’t this great? We can take less and stay together!” Friday might be the day that Leonard Williams believed he could get another $20 million/year contract.

Quandre Diggs, a potential cap casualty with $11 million in cap savings if released, eagerly retweeted the increase news:

Diggs isn’t thinking he’s going to have any meetings asking him to take a pay cut for being a top-3 paid safety without top-3 safety results.

Maybe the Seahawks thought the cap would be $245 million and now it’s $255 million, which gives them $10 million more to spend than the expectation. But this could be more realistically like a ~$7 million net cap space increase if they include players wanting more money. And perhaps the only way that it actually impacts the roster is the Seahawks saying, “Fine, we’ll keep Tyler Lockett”, who would save the team $7 million by being released.

Or they do everything else exactly the same—all the cuts, all the free agents they let walk or re-sign—but want to find out if now they can go to the table with two or three outside players who they had otherwise scratched off the list. Again, some of those players now won’t be free agents, but the money could just be used to have options in the offseason. It could even be used, if Schneider wanted to be aggressive in the draft for the first time in his career, to trade up for a player who costs more than the 16th overall pick.

But I think that Seattle’s outgoing free agent decisions were already made (pending Macdonald’s film study and opinions) and are left untouched from Friday’s news.

Geno Smith’s situation

Not yet reported on Seaside Joe is the changes in Geno’s contract this week. The Seahawks converted his roster bonus into a signing bonus, which brings down his 2024 salary cap hit a little bit and also expedites the process of paying him guaranteed money that was coming in March. If Schneider goes to the combine next week (none of the Seahawks coaches will be going) and has a conversation with a team that wants to trade for Geno Smith, he can now do that without having to wait until his bonus is paid.

The difference now is that the Seahawks don’t save any money against the cap by trading Geno before June 1, however they would save $12.9 million in salary and workout bonuses.

I still think that there is a scenario in which Seattle could draft a quarterback and put Geno on the trade market in the fall if he ends up losing a competition. That’s very unlikely, but I’m throwing it out there because you might hear “they would never trade him later in the year”…Well, sure they could. Some scenarios exist that would help the team.

If I’m ranking the most-likely outcomes for Geno in 2024, first would definitely be that he’s the Week 1 starter. A few moves have happened with his contract that imply that’s the case, although maybe another scenario without him isn’t off the table yet. I would still be surprised if he was the Week 1 starter in 2025.

Not because I don’t want it to happen. What I want doesn’t matter here unless I explicitly say it is so.