Seahawks Salary Cap Update Following Three Releases

The Seattle Seahawks had a busy Tuesday, officially releasing three players, S Jamal Adams, S Quandre Diggs, and TE Will Dissly, all of whom were expected to be cut this year.  We’ll take a quick look at what these moves mean for the Seahawks salary cap in 2024.

Adams tenure with the Seahawks mercifully comes to an end after four seasons with Seattle. Seattle traded two first round picks for Adams in 2020, a trade that many were critical of right from the start. A year after the trade the Seahawks signed Adams to a top of the market $17.5 million per year extension.

 Adams never really fit in with the type of defense Seattle played and his Seahawks run was littered with injuries. He finished each of his three extension seasons on injured reserve and only appeared in 34 games in his four year run.  

The contract got away from Seattle and became a mess to fit in their salary cap. The team used $42.3 million in prorated money to deal with cap issues while only using $4.08 million in base salary over that same time frame. It led to Adams having a bloated cap figure this year of $26.9 million and a massive dead money figure of $20.83 million. This dead money number is record for a safety by $7.47 million.  They only create $6.1 million by cutting him.

The team had a vision that was unique at the time that having two high priced safeties would be a difference maker, signing Quandre Diggs to a $13 million a year contract two years after signing Adams. Diggs had a far better run than Adams, making the Pro Bowl in 2022, but he fell victim to age (he will be 31) and salary cap considerations due to $21.263 million cap number.

The Diggs contract got away from the Seahawks in a similar manner to the Adams one. Here the team used $24.625 million in prorated bonuses to $3.375 million in salary. This left the team with $10.262 million in dead money despite him only completing two years of his three year contract. This dead money is 3^rd all time among safeties. They did save $11 million in cap room.

 Overall, the dead money between Diggs and Adams will account for $31.09 million in 2024,  a number that is higher than all but two teams have allocated to all of the safeties on their roster this year. From a historical perspective this is $13.33 million more than any team ever had allocated to dead money on safeties in a single year.

Dissly had signed a three year, $24 million contract to stay in Seattle in 2022, a really surprising number for a player who never had more than 262 receiving yards in a season. He had 521 yards in the two years he completed on the contract and his playing time dropped to under 40% this year. Dissly had a $10 million cap charge and will now count for $3.1 million in dead money.

The Seahawks ended up opening up about $24 million in cap room with the three releases. They now have $36.22 million in cap space for 2024, which ranks 16^th in the NFL. They now rank 1^st in dead money with $34.4 million.