Seahawks not picking up L.J. Collier’s fifth-year option is a no-brainer
By Lee Vowell
The Seahawks reportedly will not elect to pick up defensive lineman L.J. Collier’s fifth-year option for 2023. This obviously is the correct choice.
The strange thing about Collier is that he started all 16 games in 2020 and wasn’t awful. But something must have happened in the offseason before the 2021 season because by the time the season began, Collier wasn’t important to the Seahawks plans.
Collier was a healthy scratch in all of the first eight games except for two. And it appears the reason that Collier wasn’t playing wasn’t his on-field performance. For a team that struggled with pass rush in the first part of the year, Collier played in Week 2 and Week 5 and had quarterback hits in both games.
Seahawks decline fifth-year option on L.J. Collier
In fact, in four of the first five games Collier played in 2021, he had a quarterback hit. This while he never played more than 29 percent of the defensive snaps in any of those games. Why wasn’t Collier playing? He wasn’t very good but neither were most other people on the defensive line in terms of getting to the opposing quarterback.
What happened between 2020 when the Seahawks trusted Collier to start every game and 2021 when Seattle didn’t trust Collier to even be on the active roster for most of the first part of the season even though Collier was healthy?
It didn’t make sense for Seattle to release Collier as they would have had to eat as much cap room as he was going to make. No team was going to trade for Collier when Seattle clearly didn’t want to play him either.
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Seattle will save $11.5 million by not picking up Collier’s option in 2023. The hopeful part of this, if there is one, is maybe Collier will play a bit more in 2022 and show he is worthy of earning a new deal with any team the following year. That is very unlikely to be with the Seahawks, though.