Field Gulls
With the 2025 season quickly approaching, a quick 30,000 foot flyover of where Seattle stands on cap space.
The first padded practice of 2025 is in the books for the Seattle Seahawks, and as is the case every August, fans are excited about the potential for the upcoming season.
Still another week remains until the Seahawks will host Pete Carroll and the Las Vegas Raiders in the preseason opener at Lumen Field on Thursday, August 7, and there is absolutely no shortage of excitement for the potential of the revamped roster.
In addition, for the first time in more than a decade, Seattle not only has a roster stocked full of youth and upside, the team has amassed a small war chest of salary cap space, as the leaders of the Carroll era have been replaced with those who better suit Mike Macdonald’s style.
To that point, the top five cap hits for 2025 as of publication are:
The big catch is, of course, that four of those five players are no longer with the team, and the dead money associated with their contracts is a big part of why the Seahawks have the fourth most dead cap in the league. That, in and of itself, is not a negative, as the team with the third most dead cap in the league is the defending Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles. However, the other teams with similar amounts of dead cap are not great examples of how to run a franchise, including the Cleveland Browns ($68.4M), New York Jets ($69.8M), New Orleans Saints ($87.2M) and San Francisco 49ers ($95.9M), so feel free to interpret the dead cap any which way one wishes.
With all that said, according to OverTheCap.com, Seattle is currently sitting on just under $35M of cap space, using the Top 51 accounting methodology of the offseason. The fact that teams are still using the offseason accounting methodology is important for the simple fact that the $34.9M of cap space OTC lists the Seahawks as having only covers the 51 largest cap hits.
That means that when the team moves to full accounting ahead of the regular season in September, they will need to account for an additional two salaries, as well as the salaries of all players on injured reserve, the physically unable to perform list and the practice squad.
This could be relevant to Seattle for multiple reasons, with the largest obviously being that according to the most recent update from Mike Macdonald, there appears a reasonable possibility that Uchenna Nwosu could stay on the PUP list into the regular season. Add in Kenny McIntosh already landing on injured reserve, and that’s already 55 players that need to be paid, ahead of any additional players that might land on injured reserve through camp or the preseason.
In short, simply moving to the regular season accounting methodology for...
