4 more Seahawks have salary guarantees confirmed

Geno Smith wasn’t the only Seahawks player who had his salary guarantee confirmed.

The big news concerning the Seattle Seahawks’ cap situation was the decision to guarantee quarterback Geno Smith’s $12.7 million base salary for the 2024 season. February 16 was the deadline to either guarantee the salary or release Geno and save nearly $14 million in cap money, and Seattle opted to keep Smith on the roster. If he isn’t traded by March 18, when his $9.6 million roster bonus is due, then it’s a near certainty that he’ll be the Seahawks’ starting QB come September.

Meanwhile, there were three other Seahawks whose full or partial salary guarantees were set in stone on Friday. Again, I don’t think any of these should come as some grand surprise or interesting decision, but it’s worth the housekeeping note.

• DK Metcalf ($13 million)
• Dre’Mont Jones ($7 million of $11 million).
• Jason Myers ($3.635 million)
• Uchenna Nwosu ($9.4 million)

The only question mark was probably Dre’Mont Jones, who didn’t really wow in his first season of his three-year, $51 million contract. Here’s Field Gulls’ own John Gilbert’s detailed explanation on his situation, since he’s the only one who didn’t have a full salary guarantee:

Jones has a portion of his 2024 base salary which is injury guaranteed and which will vest into a full guarantee on the Friday after the Super. In Jones’ case, that amount is $7M. What this vesting guarantee means in Jones’ situation is that if the Seahawks were decide to move on from Jones, they would have to recognize $13.33M against the salary cap, representing the 2024 and 2025 portions of his $20M signing bonus, along with $7M of salary they would be required to pay him.

Now, for any fans who would like to posit the the Seahawks could do a post-June 1 release of Jones, the reality is that league rules do not allow a post-June 1 release until after the new league year starts in March. That, of course, means that it is impossible to do a post-June 1 release prior to the vesting into a full guarantee of that $7M of base salary, and means that a post-June 1 release would save the Seahawks $4.51M of 2024 cap space at the expense of $6.66M of 2025 cap space.

Not a lot of money will be saved with a pre-June 1 trade of Jones and cutting him is out of the question unless you want to incur triple the dead money compared to cap savings.

Myers may not have had the best season in terms of field goal percentage but he was perfect on PATs and was tasked with way more kicking than he should’ve been. Again, there is zero to minimal upside in letting him go.

Nwosu was a formality since he’s clearly one of the most productive players on the roster, and it’ll be great to see him in Mike Macdonald’s defense once he is back from injury.

I will not entertain “what if they trade DK Metcalf?” talk unless there are legitimately rumblings it could happen. Don’t let the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl again warp anyone into “wide receivers don’t matter” discourse.

We’re likely heading for a bit of an offseason lull before the Seahawks and the rest of the NFL get to work in free agency on March 13.