3 Seahawks 2022 free agents that were really good this season

Seahawks brought back a blast from the past

It wasn’t the only deal the Hawks made to reload the team. While it wasn’t nearly as cost-effective as the signing of Goodwin, there’s no doubt that the return of prodigal son defensive end Quinton Jefferson was a success. An unqualified success? No, but that particular story will come up another day. Jefferson wasn’t great, but he was plenty good.

As I wrote when the Seahawks brought him back to the fold, Jefferson was never a world-beater, but he most definitely got the job done in his first run with the Hawks. Comparing his stats in 2021 with Las Vegas to this past season, you can see that Jefferson had a solid year. In three starts, he had 565 snaps on defense and a total of 29 combined tackles. Compared to his stats in Vegas, you might think that his production declined. Despite starting all 17 games for the Raiders, Jefferson only got 685 snaps on the D-line. Yet he racked up 47 combined tackles there. So he fell off a cliff, right?

Not so fast, my friend.  Virtually all of that dropoff was on assists. He had the same number of solo tackles, 17, in both years. What’s much more impressive is that he increased his tackles for a loss from five to six and his QB hits from 5.5 to 6.5. He even broke up two passes for the Hawks last season.

Now, none of this production came cheap. Jefferson got the second-biggest contract of any of Seattle’s free-agent pickups last year. At $9.5 million over two years and over $5 million guaranteed, the Hawks paid handsomely for that production. If they’d been able to bring him back for the money they paid Goodwin, his story would have been much more impressive. As it is, Jefferson’s return was still good for Seattle.