With the Seahawks 2024 season taking a significant turn for the worse, many fans have consoled themselves with the idea that this is a rebuilding year. But the reality of the situation is that the team didn’t intend to rebuild, and 2024 is yet another season in a string of failures to field a competitive roster.
As summer has turned to fall, the colorful 3-0 start to the season for the 2024 Seattle Seahawks has quickly turned brown, as the team has lost five of six with a pair of key division games on tap. In Week 11 the Hawks travel to take on the San Francisco 49ers before the Arizona Cardinals come to Lumen Field in Week 12.
Before getting to the games, though, one thing needs to be set straight, and that is that the Seahawks did not treat 2024 as a rebuilding year.
Certainly there’s been debate among fans about whether or not the Hawks are rebuilding, and whether or not the team looked at the start of the Mike Macdonald era as a multi-year rebuild. However, the actions of the team send the unmistakable message that the Hawks did not spend the offseason and the first several weeks of the season looking to the future, opting instead to assemble a group designed to compete in 2024.
Rebuilding teams prioritize assembling a collection of youth and future potential. They do not hand out short-term contracts to older veterans who won’t be around for long and will block younger players from necessary game experience and practice reps. They stockpile draft picks to maximize the number of shots they have at landing a difference maker in the draft. They conserve cap space in the present to rollover into future seasons so that when the younger players with upside potential reach that upside they can be extended.
The 2024 Seahawks have done the opposite of all of that.
Specifically, during the offseason the Seahawks gave out one-year contracts to several players to fill holes in the roster. Those players included Jerome Baker, Tyrel Dodson, Laken Tomlinson, Pharaoh Brown, Nick Harris, Johnathan Hankins and others. It would be one thing if these players had signed for veteran minimum, but they didn’t. Individually none of the contracts are the kind to cause immediate revolt, but collectively it’s a group that will cost the Seahawks more than $10M of cap space more than paying youngsters on league minimum contracts would cost while providing negative value after 2024.
The negative value comes from the fact that these players, at least the ones who are still around and have yet to be traded or waived, are consuming the extremely valuable practice reps and game experience that the younger players on the roster need in order to develop and reach their potential.
Practice time is very limited in the NFL by the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement, with each team allowed just 16 padded practices of 2.5 hours each during training camp and an additional 14 practices of 3 hours each during the regular season. That’s a total over the course of the entire year of just 82 hours of padded practices, and means that the thousand or so snaps of game action teams have each year have become critical in terms of player development.
For example, in his sixth season in the NFL former Seahawks linebacker Cody Barton has blossomed and is providing the Denver Broncos something resembling competent linebacker play. Part of the reason that he is performing at the highest level of his career is that he is 27 years old, which is the age at which the human body typically reaches peak physical performance.
However, in addition to this, Barton is also more experienced, and as with any job, everything else being held equal, the more experienced one is at something, the better one is able to execute in that role. For Barton that means that after playing just 558 defensive snaps during his first three years in the league while stuck behind the likes of Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright and Jordyn Brooks, he logged 959 snaps for Seattle in 2022 and 844 for the Washington Commanders in 2023. Being on the field that much gives a player a much better understanding of their job, while acquiring the knowledge that comes with real world experience.
To that point, so far in 2024 third-round pick Christian Haynes has played 104 snaps while 32-year old Laken Tomlinson has played every offensive snap. Tyrice Knight has seen the first for only 125 defensive snaps, including just 7 snaps since Week 4 while stuck behind Baker, Dodson and the recently acquired Ernest Jones. A.J. Barner appears to have moved himself into the role as the backup tight end behind Noah Fant, which makes the fully guaranteed contract given to Pharaoh Brown to play 116 offensive snaps even more of a head scratcher. The list goes on, but this is already running long, and there are other topics to cover.
Specifically, as noted, the Seahawks recently traded for Ernest Jones, sending a 2025 fourth-round pick to the Tennessee Titans in so doing, even though Jones is only under contract for the remainder of 2024 and will likely be in high demand as a free agent next spring. The trade for Jones came just nine days after John Schneider sent a sixth-round pick to the Jacksonville Jaguars to acquire 31-year old Roy Robertson-Harris. Sure, Roberston-Harris is under contract through 2026, but does a rebuilding team really need to send a future draft pick for a player on the wrong side of 30? If the trade for Robertson-Harris was to build for the future, exactly when are the Seahawks supposed to move from rebuilding to competing? How many over-30 defensive tackles making $6M per year does a rebuilding team need?
And on the subject of committing to over-30 players, are rebuilding teams supposed to give $21.5M per year contracts to defensive linemen on the wrong side of 30? Now, Leonard Williams is a beast and fills a needed role for the Seahawks, but he’s also 30, already cost the team a pair of draft picks and is not inexpensive. If Seattle is not competing this season and is rebuilding, why commit that much cap space to a player who is already past their prime and will be further past their prime by the time the team is contending? Does a rebuilding team need a tight end making more than $10M per year?
And on the subject of cap spending, rebuilding teams conserve cap space. Rather than conserve cap space, the 2024 Seahawks have borrowed from future seasons. They converted $11.875M of DK Metcalf’s 2024 salary to signing bonus to create cap space this season and push the cap hit into the future. They converted $9.875M of Dre’Mont Jones’ 2024 salary to signing bonus to create cap space this season and push the cap hit into the future. They restructured Tyler Lockett’s contract to push part of his cap hit into 2025. They converted Geno Smith’s roster bonus to signing bonus to push half of the cap hit into 2025.
In short, they handed out several big contracts by borrowing from future cap seasons. Borrowing against future cap years is not in and of itself an issue, but realistically the only reason to do so is to compete in the present year. And the Seahawks are not competitive this season, in spite of a mandate from ownership to compete.
Boiling it all down to the bones, the simple fact is that evaluating the actions of the team in totality leads to only one reasonable conclusion, which is that the Seahawks built their 2024 roster to compete. They did nothing that rebuilding teams typically do, and yet the result is an on-field product that has visiting fans filling the stands and the team in last place in the division.
Because in spite of their attempts to remain relevant and remain competitive, the 2024 Seahawks are far from being able to hang with the top teams in the league and are floundering at midseason. Even though that wasn’t their intention.