Field Gulls
The calendar has flipped to July, with a long weekend on the horizon, for many that will help pass the two weeks and a day until rookies of the Seattle Seahawks report for training camp on July 17, with veterans slated to do the same exactly one week later.
That will mark the end of the summer slow season and the beginning of the Super Bowl title defense for the Seahawks, after dismantling the New England Patriots 29-13 in Super Bowl LX back in February. With that the case, the 90-man roster the team will bring to camp is filled out, though just as every year there will undoubtedly be competition at the fringes of the roster that brings significant movement.
With attention now turning to training camp, it’s as good a time as any to review the salary cap situation of the team, as there are unlikely to be any major changes in the immediate weeks. Certainly a Devon Witherspoon extension could be in the works, but that is a development that seems more likely to take place in mid- to late August for other reasons.
All of that in mind, the starting point for the cap situation for this analysis is the $25.49M as listed for the team at OverTheCap.com, a nearly identical number to the $25.71M of space the NFLPA lists in its Public Salary Cap Report.
Fans, of course, see that number and starting dreaming of adding an impact player who could help the Seahawks on the field in 2026. However, what the team is likely to do with that space is far more mundane, and the most immediate uses will likely be to build out the practice squad and setting some space aside for injury replacements.
For the 2026 season practice squad players will be paid $13,750 each week, which means that a full squad of 16 members on the roster for all 18 weeks will require $3.96M of cap space. Long time Field Gulls readers will be more than aware of the way in which the Seahawks tend to manage their practice squad, which results in more than 16 practice squad players earning practice squad pay each week.
In addition, when players are elevated from the practice squad to the active roster, that player earns league minimum for a member of the 53-man roster for their level of experience that week. That increase will almost always be in the $35k-$55k range, and even just a single elevation each week results in additional cap charges in the neighborhood of $600k. Thus, between the ghost roster and weekly elevations, an additional $1M of cap charges is not out of the question, which allows for the cost of the practice squad for the season to be estimated at a nice, round $5M of cap space.
As for the injury pool, the assumptions for when and how many players land on injured reserve can vary based on different methods for generating the estimates. The Seahawks were relatively healthy...
