Seahawks quandary: extend Bobby Wagner or Jarran Reed?

Bobby Wagner will turn 29 this summer, while Jarran Reed won’t be 27 until December. Age certainly matters in the NFL. Ask Earl Thomas or Richard Sherman how much the Seahawks trust 30-year-old players. But Reed is just two years younger than Fletcher Cox, and the Eagles star has been destroying opponents for the past five years. Aaron Donald has been dominating the league for those same five years and is just 28 years old.

You can’t say it isn’t fair to compare Reed to the best players at his position when he wants to be paid like them. If he can at least repeat his performance, if not improve on it in 2019, then sure, pay the man. One year doesn’t establish a consistent level of performance. I imagine the Seahawks want to see more than one good year before extending Reed for another four or five.

Finally, Wagner is already making some serious dollars. Counting bonuses, Wagner’s cap hit for 2019 is just over $14 million, according to spotrac.com. Making him the top-paid linebacker in the league would cost Seattle in the range of an additional $5 million per year (Mosley’s contract averages $17 million per year). That’s certainly a figure the Seahawks can handle.

Reed’s contract is a very different story. His cap hit for 2019 is $1.4 million. That’s one-point-four, not fourteen. Getting Reed into the realm of the top five contracts for defensive tackles will take a lot of money. The average cap hit of the top five contracts at his position is $15.6 million. Yes, that would be a $14 million dollar raise. You could expect at least $30 million to be guaranteed, based on deals signed by Kawann Short and Geno Atkins last year. If you were wondering, Aaron Donald got a bit less than $87 million guaranteed.