The regular season has come and gone, leaving darkness and dullness of the offseason in its place. For the Seattle Seahawks there will be plenty of questions that need to be addressed over the coming months, including cap casualties, extensions, draft picks and all of those things.
However, there will also be several players whose contracts will expire at the end of the league year in March, meaning the team will need to decide what to do with each of those players.
When the contract of a player expires, they fall into one of three free agent categories:
- Exclusive Rights Free Agent (ERFA)
- Restricted Free Agent (RFA)
- Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA)
Which category a player falls into is determined by how many accrued seasons the player has earned during their time in the NFL, with the number of accrued seasons determined by how much time they have spent in full pay status. A player earns an accrued season by being in full pay status for six or more games during the regular season, with full pay status defined as being on the 53 man roster or injured reserve.
Exclusive Rights Free Agents
An Exclusive Rights Free Agent (ERFA) is a player who has two or fewer accrued seasons in the NFL upon the expiration of their contract. If a team wishes to retain the services of an ERFA for the following league year, they simply need to extend a tender offer to the player that is equal to the league minimum salary for the number of credited seasons the player has during their career.
The Seahawks have several ERFAs, including:
- WR Cody White
- WR John Rhys Plumlee
- TE Brady Russell
- NT Brandon Pili
- OLB Joshua Onujiogu
- LB Josh Ross
Restricted Free Agents
A Restricted Free Agent (RFA) is a player with exactly three accrued seasons. Teams have multiple options when it comes to extending tender offers to RFAs through a complicated system that gives the team a large amount of control over the movement of the player, while giving most players a significant raise over past earnings.
The first decision teams need to make is whether or not to tender a player. Should they opt to not tender a player, that player immediately becomes an unrestricted free agent able to sign with any team once the new league year starts. Should they decide to extend a tender offer to a player, there are three levels of tender that they may extend, which are:
- Original Round Tender: Projected at $3.185M for 2025
- Second Round Tender: Projected at $5.217M for 2025
- First Round Tender: Projected at $7.279M for 2025
There’s not a lot of need for discussion about the mechanics of the tenders and the potential for the Seahawks to use one of the tenders because the team has only a pair of RFAs this offseason:
- WR Jaelon Darden
- CB Josh Jobe
It seems unlikely either warrants even the use of an original round tender, and it’s likely that both can be brought back on a contract at or near league minimum without having to use one of the RFA tenders.
Unrestricted Free Agents
An Unrestricted Free Agent (UFA) is a player who has four or more accrued seasons in the NFL, and the majority of players fans dream of signing in the offseason are UFAs. The Seahawks have a rather lengthy list of players whose contracts are set to expire, but the number of names on the list that would be considered priorities for the team to retain in 2025 is small. In any case, the current Seahawks set to hit unrestricted free agency in March are:
- TE Pharaoh Brown
- LG Laken Tomlinson
- RT Stone Forsythe
- NT Jarran Reed
- NT Johnathan Hankins
- OLB Trevis Gipson
- LB Ernest Jones
- S K’Von Wallace
- CB Tre Brown
- CB Artie Burns
Practice Squad Players
Lastly, practice squads are dissolved at the conclusion of the regular season, meaning the current members of the Seahawks will become unrestricted free agents at 4pm New York time on Monday, January 6. Once that happens they are free to sign with any team in the league, though most often what happens is that majority of players on the practice squad of a team sign a future contract with the team for which they were on the practice squad.
A future contract is nothing more than a contract for a future league year, meaning those players who do sign a future contract aren’t technically members of the Seahawks roster from now until the start of the new league year in March, but they will automatically become members of the roster when the new league year start on March 12.
The current Seahawks practice squad includes:
- C Mike Novitsky
- WR Miles Boykin
- WR Cornell Powell
- T McClendon Curtis
- TE Tyler Mabry
- DT Quinton Bohanna
- LB Michael Dowell
- LB Kenneth Odemegwu
- LB Tyreke Smith
- CB Artie Burns
- CB Ryan Cooper
- CB Tyler Hall
- CB Damarion Williams
- FS Ty Okada
And now it’s on to the 2025 NFL Combine in Indianapolis.