Schneider: Seahawks have plan for ‘tight’ salary cap situation

With the NFL Draft complete, the Seattle Seahawks can now shift towards inking their eight new draft picks to their first pro contracts.

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However, there appears to be one major problem on that front. According to OverTheCap.com, the Seahawks don’t have the salary cap space to sign all of their picks. OTC currently projects Seattle with roughly $1.6 million in cap space without its rookie signings. With the rookies in the fold, the projection is Seattle will be about $1.4 million past the threshold.

President of football operations/general manager John Schneider addressed the situation when he and head coach Mike Macdonald joined Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob on Thursday.

“We are fairly close (to the cap limit),” Schneider confirmed. “We budgeted for that, but yeah, we’re pretty tight.”

Schneider didn’t go into full details about exactly how the team would lower its cap number to create space for its rookie signings and other potential free agents, but he eluded to an avenue the team could turn to.

“There’s some of the automatic stuff that can happen where you can create cap space like we did with (Quandre Diggs) and Jamal (Adams) and that sort of stuff last year,” Schneider said.

What Schneider is referring to is the restructuring of contracts by converting the base salary of a player’s deal into a signing bonus to clear cap space. The Seahawks did that with Adams and Diggs last year. Seattle converted $9.92 million of Adams’ salary into a bonus last season, which saved the team $6.61 million against the cap, and Diggs’ restructure also saved the team around $6 million.

The Seahawks have already restructured the deals of quarterback Geno Smith and wide receiver Tyler Lockett this offseason. Another candidate to restructure could be wide receiver DK Metcalf, who holds the highest salary on the team at $13 million in 2024, according to OTC.com. Defensive lineman Dre’Mont Jones was the next highest among players who hadn’t already restructured at $11 million.

“We may have a couple of those we utilize to create some more room, but we’re budgeted to be able to just keep trying to work our team through the trade deadline,” Schneider said. “We’re not done. … We try to budget all the way through.”

Listen to the full conversation with John Schneider and Mike Macdonald at this link or in the audio player near the top of this story. Tune in to Wyman and Bob weekdays from 2-6 p.m.

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