Geno Smith named one of most valuable 2023 free agents

As the 2023 NFL season heads towards Conference Championship Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks are well into preparing for an offseason in which they will need to address several positions. There has been no shortage of ink spilled on the need for the team to answer several questions regarding the big guys in the trenches on both sides of the ball, along with multiple role players set to hit unrestricted free agency.

The big question, though, of course, is how the Seahawks will handle the quarterback position in the offseason, as they currently have exactly zero quarterbacks under contract for 2023. Obviously, many fans are expecting the team to look to the draft to address the position, but the reality is that less than ten percent of first round quarterbacks have been able to deliver eight or more wins as a rookie.

Those two facts combine to make the Geno Smith situation very interesting, and while the majority of fans expect Smith to return to the Seahawks in 2023, until he puts pen to paper that cannot be guaranteed. Thus, with all eyes on how much Smith could demand in free agency, offseason free agent rankings have begun to roll in, and PFF has Geno tapped as one of the highest rated free agents in the entire league.

For those wondering how valuable PFF claims Smith was to the success of the Seahawks in 2023, their Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metric for Geno comes in at 3.01. That, of course, would mean that Smith’s performance for the team was the difference between the 9-8 record the team posted in the regular season and finishing somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-11.

And, as for those who don’t have any faith in the WAR metrics generated by PFF, their numbers for Smith are not all that far off from the WAR numbers produced by SIS, which values his performance as having been worth right around two wins.

Thus, while the question doesn’t change, the reality is the options for Seattle this offseason are to pay for a veteran who they know or roll the dice with a rookie who is unlikely to be able to deliver the desired on field results in 2023.