Karen Gilmore from Logan Lake, British Columbia asks, “With so many players becoming unrestricted free agents, why do the Seahawks still not have much salary cap space? I can’t imagine it’s all because of COVID-19 and the reduced salary cap.”
A: In general, the Seahawks have been a team that uses most if not all of their cap space every year—good teams tend to spend their money to stay competitive, especially teams with top-tier quarterbacks who (deservedly) take up a lot of the salary cap—so that’s a good place to start in this conversation. The Seahawks just haven’t been a team with a ton of money to throw around in free agency most years, especially once they started paying second and third contracts to players who earned them with their play early in the Pete Carroll/John Schneider era.
This year in particular, however, the Seahawks are up against it when it comes to the cap—a big factor in releasing Carlos Dunlap II earlier this week—but they’re hardly alone. Because teams were playing in empty or partly full stadiums all year, revenue was down league-wide, and as a result, the salary cap dropped from more than $198 million in 2020 to $182.5 million for this coming season. A drop of nearly $16 million would be significant on its own, but it’s worth remembering that when teams are signing players to multi-year deals, they’re projecting several years ahead, meaning the Seahawks and other teams were thinking, prior to COVID-19, that the cap would have gone up in 2021 (the cap has gone up $10 million or so a year, give or take a couple million, for almost a decade since the 2011 collective bargaining agreement). So as teams, the Seahawks included, were structuring contracts and making roster decisions in 2018 and 2019, they were likely thinking the 2021 cap would likely fall somewhere in the $210 million range, but instead it’s nearly $30 million below that, meaning a ton of teams, not just the Seahawks are tight on money heading into free agency unless they make moves to free up space.