The Seattle Seahawks expected to lose several key free agents this past offseason in free agency. The team would have loved to keep safety Coby Bryant, for instance, but was not willing to overpay for him. The same is true of edge rusher Boye Mafe.
General manager John Schneider watched as Mafe signed with the Cincinnati Bengals for three years and as much as $60 million. The superstar GM wasn't going to have the same thing happen next offseason with edge rusher Derick Hall. Instead, the team worked out an extension with Hall for three years beyond 2026 and as much as $42 million.
Seth Walder of ESPN didn't care for that, however. Instead, in handing a B- offseason grade to Seattle, the NFL analyst believes Schneider should have traded Hall, saved a bit of money on an extension, and used some of that to re-sign Mafe. The issue is that isn't a very Seahawks thing to do.
ESPN gets the Seattle Seahawks all wrong about Derick Hall versus Boye Mafe
Seattle has their own value on a position and a player, and if the player can get more on the open market, good for them. Mafe returning to the team would have been great, and possibly Schneider was willing to give the edge rusher a contract that paid him into the teens of millions every year. That has no bearing on what the Bengals were willing to pay, and that's key.
The Seahawks were not going to pay Boye Mafe $20 million a season. He was a very good player whose raw statistics last season (he had just two sacks) do not tell the entire story about his value. The same, though, is true of Hall, who also only had two sacks, but 12s understand his meaning to the overall defense goes far beyond those paltry sack totals.
Derick Hall is a well-rounded edge player who had eight sacks in 2024 and is capable of more, but it is his fit in head coach Mike Macdonald's scheme that matters most. He is a force on all three downs and elite against the run. Extending him for $9 million a season less on average than what Cincinnati paid Mafe was brilliant.
Seth Walder proposed that Seattle should have traded Hall, but that doesn't make much sense, either. The edge rush group would have been fairly old without Hall and would have had to pay Mafe more, even though he is a comparable player to Hall. Both are good against the run and pass, but the Seattle Seahawks went with the correct option of extending Hall.
Maybe Mafe has 10 or more sacks this coming season with the Bengals, and let's hope he does. He was a good player as well as a good person in Seattle. But Hall could finish with three sacks and still have a better overall value on his defense than Mafe does on his with the Bengals.
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