Field Gulls
Seattle traded Geno Smith to the Raiders and signed Darnold to save cap space, so here’s how much those moves will actually save them in 2025.
The Seattle Seahawks traded quarterback Geno Smith to the Las Vegas Raiders and inked former Minnesota Vikings signal caller Sam Darnold to a three-year contract reportedly in order to both get younger at the position and to save money.
There’s no debating that that Seahawks got younger under center by making the swap, and now the terms of the Darnold contract have been made public, allowing the debate about how much cap space may or may not have been saved in the coming years to begin.
Without wasting time, here is what the contract includes:
Of course, what fans want is to know how much cap space that structure will use, so here are the cap numbers by season
As has already been reported, $17.5M of Darnold’s 2026 base salary will vest into fully guaranteed on the Friday after the Super Bowl in 2026, which is the normal guarantee vesting structure the Hawks have used on their big contracts for the past decade. This means that Seattle can get out of the deal after two years should they so with, and it will have cost the team $66.7M, of which $19.2M would be the dead money charge recognized against the cap in 2027.
