How the salary cap causes grief for the Seahawks (and every other team)

The Seahawks have big decisions to make this off-season, and almost all of them are based on the salary cap. If you aren’t sure how that works, read on.

The Seahawks have this little thing to contend with called a salary cap, just like the other 31 teams in the league. The cap is a simple concept. Each team is allowed to spend the same amount of money on its players. This promotes parity, unless you’re in New England or Cleveland (up until this year, that is).

So the salary cap determines just how much money the Seahawks – and every other team – can spend in any given year. No team can spend more than the cap in any given year. This is why you’ll often see multi-year contracts set at different dollar amounts for different seasons. General managers like John Schneider piece together the salary puzzle in every contract so it all fits under the cap.

Seattle Seahawks

The excellent sports financial site spotrac.com shows Seattle has just under $55 million in cap space for 2019. The salary cap for 2019 is believed to be between $189 and $191 million. That’s a nice increase from the 2018 cap, which was $177.8 million. I say believed, because it won’t be set until we get closer to the start of free agency, March 13th. For an in-depth number-crunching look at how the dollar amount is set, check out this great article on thefootballeducator.com, Ted Sundquist’s brilliant site on all things NFL.

The cap is why the Seahawks made the difficult choices before 2018 to trade Michael Bennett to the Eagles, and let Richard Sherman walk into free agency and the 49ers.  Seattle saved $11 million by releasing Sherman, and cleared $30 million over three years from their ledger with the Bennett trade. That money paid new players like D.J. Fluker and J.R. Sweezy, and another year for Duane Brown, all players that were integral to Seattle’s reinvigorated running game.

Seahawks have huge salary commitments coming

The cap is also why the Seahawks face more difficult decisions this off-season. The brilliant and beastly Frank Clark counted just $1.2 million against the cap in 2018, including his pro-rated signing bonus. He’s expected to make at least ten times that in his next contract, and likely much more. This is why some players will certainly not return in 2019, and why there’s still a lot of debate about the future of K.J. Wright in Seattle. With $190 some million available, there simply isn’t enough money to go around to every player you want to keep.

Look at it this way. In 2018, the Seahawks best two players were quarterback Russell Wilson and linebacker Bobby Wagner. No one will dispute they were the best and most important players. Now check the numbers on the salary cap for 2019, again from spotrac.com. Wilson has $25 million total compensation that counts against the cap. Again, that’s salary and bonuses. Wagner has $14 million total due in 2019. If you click the link, or just read this sentence, I guess, you’ll see that those two players alone account for 20 percent of the Seahawks salary cap.

Jump to 2018 and scroll down, way down, and you’ll see that Frank Clark’s contract only accounted for .67 percent of the total team salary cap. Yes, that’s two-thirds of one percent. As I said earlier, he’s certain to make at least ten times as much going forward. At a minimum salary of $12 million – more likely $15, but we’ll just stick with 12 – his pay raise will eat the entire cap increase from 2018 to 2019. To be sure, Clark deserves every penny. Add in Doug Baldwin, and Seattle’s top four contracts – Wilson, Wagner, Clark, and Baldwin – will eat up a full third of their cap in 2019. This is why Lee Vowell thought the unthinkable, that Baldwin could be released.

Wilson and Wagner will see big pay raises soon, as their contracts expire after 2019. Even though the cap will almost certainly rise again in 2020, it won’t be enough to make up for those increases alone. The Seahawks have to meticulously plan for every dollar on every contract in every year. Failure to do so leads directly down the path to madness, and until recently, the Cleveland Browns.