SEATTLE – There was a changing of the guard within the Seattle Seahawks’ receiving corps in 2024 as Jaxon Smith-Njigba emerged as one of the team’s top options, while Tyler Lockett moved into a supporting role.
Could there be more changes afoot before the 2025 season as Lockett and DK Metcalf enter the final seasons of their contracts?
Before any decisions regarding the futures of those two players figure to be made, the Seahawks will hire a new offensive coordinator to replace Ryan Grubb, who certainly couldn’t be accused of not trying to get the ball to his receivers enough.
As we continue our postseason reviews of the Seahawks’ position groups, let’s look at the receiver spot.
DK Metcalf
Age: 27.
Snaps played in regular season: 832, 75.64% via Pro Football Reference.
Contract situation: Metcalf has one year remaining on the three-year extension he signed in 2022 that was worth as much as $72 million. He’s due a nonguaranteed base salary of $18.471 million in 2025.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba
Age: 22.
Snaps played in regular season: 948, 86.18%.
Contract situation: Smith-Njigba has two years remaining on his rookie deal that is worth $14.4 million. He’s due to make $1.5 million in 2025 with a cap hit of $3.93 million.
Tyler Lockett
Age: 32.
Snaps played in regular season: 765, 69.55%.
Contract situation: Lockett has one year left on the two-year restructured deal he agreed to last March. He has no guaranteed money remaining but is due a $5.3 million roster bonus on March 18 and has a $10 million base salary. Those numbers, combined with other bonuses, give him a $30.895 million cap hit in 2025. The Seahawks can save $17 million of that if Lockett is released.
Backup
Jake Bobo
Age: 24.
Snaps played in regular season: 319, 29%.
Contract situation: Bobo is entering the final year of his contract in 2025, due a nonguaranteed base salary of $1.030 million.
Others on roster: Cody White (2-44 in 2024), Dareke Young, John Rhys Plumlee, Jaelon Darden, Cornell Powell (all had no catches in 2024).
2024 in review
The Seahawks entered the season hoping the addition of Grubb combined with Smith-Njigba taking a step forward would give them one of the best receiving trios – if not the best – in the NFL.
Things rarely go to plan in the NFL and they didn’t for the Seahawks.
Smith-Njigba held up his end of the bargain, breaking out in his sophomore NFL season to finish with 100 catches and tie Lockett’s 2020 franchise single-season record. He had 1,130 receiving yards and a team-high six touchdowns.
It looked like Metcalf might be on the verge of a career-best season. He set a team record when he broke the 100-yard receiving mark in three straight games in Weeks 2-4.
Metcalf suffered a right knee sprain late in a Week 7 win at Atlanta. That injury knocked him out two games – one more than he’d missed in his entire career – and seemed to knock his season off course.
After recording 99 or more receiving yards in four of the first seven games, Metcalf didn’t top the 70 mark in any of the final eight.
Still, Metcalf finished with 66 receptions for 992 yards, with per-game averages almost identical to his career marks – 4.4 receptions per game compared to 4.5 for his career, and 66.1 yards per game compared to 65.2 for his career.
For all the debate about how Metcalf played this year, his season was on par with every other year of his career other than TDs (five compared to his career average of eight per season). Maybe that indicates that, six years into his career, Metcalf is who he is at this point.
Lockett either saw age begin to take its toll, or as he insisted at the end of the season, had to adjust to a new role that limited his targets. Either way, Lockett’s numbers dropped to their lowest total since his first three years in the NFL, finishing with 49 receptions for 600 yards and two TDs.
No other receiver on the roster caught more than Bobo’s 13 receptions for 107 yards and a TD (veteran Laviska Shenault Jr. was released in December with just five receptions for 36 yards).
None of the other receivers played more than the 62 snaps of Cody White, who was signed off the practice squad on Nov. 16.
2025 preview
This looms as the most uncertainty facing the Seahawks receiving corps heading into an offseason since 2019, when Doug Baldwin retired and the Seahawks drafted Metcalf to replace him.
Lockett appears likely headed out with the Seahawks needing to clear cap space. OvertheCap.com has revised its cap numbers for the 2025 season to include 2024 carry-over and what will be needed for draft picks and lists the Seahawks as being $30 million over the cap in effective cap space for 2025.
Teams need to be in cap compliance by the start of the new league year on March 12, so a move with Lockett likely comes by then.
The two news conferences Lockett held the week of the season finale against the Rams – one a few days before and following the game – felt like pre-emptive farewells.
Metcalf’s contract situation is also one to watch. Neither Metcalf nor the team will want him to go into 2025 without some long-term certainty about his future.
If Metcalf is cut or traded before June 1, the Seahawks would save $10.875 million while taking a $21 million dead cap hit.
A post-June 1 trade or release saves all of Metcalf’s $18.471 million salary for 2024 while incurring a dead cap hit of $13.875 million.
The Seahawks could be tempted to trade Metcalf. But if they do so while taking a $21 million dead cap hit and saving just $10.875 million, they’d better be getting a significant haul in return.
The question is what the market would be for a high-priced receiver entering the final year of his deal.
The Seahawks’ likely preferred option is to work out another two- to three-year deal with Metcalf to assure he stays.
They likely have work to do to add to its receiving corps replacing Lockett, with no obvious replacements on the roster.
In his end-of-season news conference, coach Mike Macdonald said the hope is to get more Metcalf more involved in the offense in 2025 – he averaged 7.2 targets this season compared to 8.3 in 2022 when he caught a career-high 90 passes.
“I felt like we felt DK’s presence consistently throughout the year and there were some explosives that he really tilted the game in our favor and that’s really the vision we have for him,” Macdonald said.