4 players who could be playing their final four games with the Seattle Seahawks

Let's start with the theory that the Seattle Seahawks will likely miss the playoffs in 2023, but even if they don't, is the team set up to be even better in 2024? Seattle is basically following the same trend as last year by having a decent record in mid-season before having a swoon until late in the year. Seattle has no real reason to lose its final three games so 9-8 is still possible.

9-8, however, is the same record as last year even though Seattle was fairly aggressive in free agency and appears to have had another solid draft in 2023. The Seahawks are currently a mediocre franchise and being mediocre is many times more difficult to overcome than simply being bad. Bad teams have really high draft picks; Mediocre teams draft in the 12-23 range; they get good players but not transformative most of the time.

Seattle cannot have any fear this offseason. They cannot simply come into 2024 expecting much better results. To truly improve, they might need to blow up the roster a bit, take a step backward to move three steps forward. Here are four players who might need to go after this year.

No. 1 - Quarterback Geno Smith

While Geno Smith can be a divisive figure among 12s, just like lots of QB1s can be around the league, over the course of two years he has not been awful. Over the course of his 32 starts in Seattle, he has a quarterback rating of 96.6 with 50 touchdowns (a solid 4.7 touchdown percentage per throw) against 21 interceptions (a not-bad 2.0 percentage), and he has completed 67.7 percent of his throws. Those are winnable numbers as long as the team is better around the quarterback.

Geno Smith just is not good enough to elevate a team from mediocre to good. He never will be as he never has been. Will Geno Smith keep Seattle in football games and in a race for the playoffs most seasons? Yes. But he is not good enough to push the team over the proverbial hump into contender status.

The above also applies to backup Drew Lock. Either Smith or Lock needs to leave after 2023, but Smith makes more money, and releasing him brings a lot more cap room. Lock is a free agent in 2024, but he is only paid $4 million this year and isn't going to make much more, if any, with whomever he signs next offseason. Losing Smith means bringing in a veteran quarterback or drafting his replacement and drafting a quarterback should be much better long-term. The cap saving by releasing Smith would be $13.8 million.

No. 2 - Safety Jamal Adams

Unlike Geno Smith, Jamal Adams has been fairly awful on and off the field in 2023. Adams is graded 75th among safeties this year, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required). PFF only has 91 safeties ranked who meet minimum snap counts. This means Adams is in the bottom quarter of NFL safeties, though he has a cap hit of $11,496,666 in 2023 with a cap hit that jumps to $26,916,666 in 2024 and is even higher in 2025.

We always knew Adams was bad in coverage. Plus, he cannot catch when an errant pass actually hits him in the chest. This happened many times in 2020 when Adams dropped at least 3 potential picks that literally hit him in the facemask or the chest. Safeties need to create turnovers in other ways than rushing the quarterback and hoping the QB fumbles.

In 2023, Adams has a passer rating allowed of 94.6, the second-highest of Adams' career. He has allowed 24 of the 30 passes tossed his way to be completed. Against the San Francisco 49ers in Week 14, Adams was targeted 3 times and allowed 2 to be completed for 79 yards and a bad touchdown where he simply got toasted by 49ers receiver Deebo Samuel (Adams also missed three tackles). Adams will continue to allow those types of play to happen because he simply is not good in coverage.

Adams' unique gift has always been pressuring the line of scrimmage and while he does have 7 tackles for loss - second on the team - he has only 2 quarterback hits, no sacks, and he is missing a career-high 12.7 percent of his tackles. The Seahawks oddly reworked Adams' deal before the 2023 season which made his dead cap number go higher. Still, should Seattle release Adams before 2024, the team would save a little over $6 million.

No. 3 - Defensive end Frank Clark

12s hoped that bringing back Frank Clark during the middle of 2023 might rejuvenate Clark and greatly help with the consistency of the Seahawks' pass rush. Clark was great in the postseason for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2019 and 2020, but he was not overly productive during the regular season from 2020 through 2022 with the Chiefs. Clark left in free agency and signed with the Denver Broncos during the past offseason.

With the Broncos at the beginning of this year, Clark was either injured or unproductive. He played in only two games and didn't have a quarterback hit, tackle for loss or a sack. Denver released him as he was simply a siphon on the team's salary cap.

Seattle picking Clark up made sense on paper. Clark was good at the beginning of his career with the Seahawks and he wanted to come back. Plus, Seattle simply needs more players who can make their pass rush more consistent. The hope was that Clark could come in, be a veteran voice to young edge rushers such as Derick Hall, and get some pressure in limited snaps.

Clark has been so awful, though, that the last two games he has been a healthy scratch. In five games with Seattle in 2023, Clark has played on 135 snaps, yet has not recorded a quarterback hit, tackle for loss, not a sack. He is a free agent after this year and Seattle is only paying him $711,944 this year. But he hasn't been worth anywhere even close to that amount.

No. 4 - Safety Quandre Diggs

As bad as Jamal Adams has been in 2023, Quandre Diggs has arguably been worse. In a way, this is a bit sadder. The reason I say this is because many times since Diggs was traded to Seattle during the 2019 season, he has saved bad coverage by flying around the back end of the secondary. In 55 games for Seattle between 2019 and 2022, Diggs had 17 interceptions and 27 passes defended.

But in 13 games in 2023, Diggs has just 1 interception and 3 passes defended. His passer rating allowed is a career-high 100.2 this season. He has allowed 10.5 yards per target which is his second-highest amount since 2018. He is also missing 12.0 percent of his tackles, his highest number since 2019.

I would also like to believe that the leg injury that Diggs suffered late in the 2021 season is somehow affecting him, but this would be false. He was fine last year and played every game so there was no reason his injury would skip a year of slowing him down. While Jamal Adams is the number 75 graded safety, per PFF, Adams is 85 - seventh-worst in the league.

Diggs is a free agent after 2024, but next year he has a cap hit of $21,262,500. His dead cap is $10,262,500 meaning Seattle would save $11 million by moving on from Diggs. That would seem like a no-brainer at this point.

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