The Seattle Seahawks are the reigning Super Bowl champions, having handily defeated the New England Patriots 29-13 in the home stadium of the NFC West rival San Francisco 49ers.
With the victory comes bragging rights for the entirety of the offseason, along with the difficulty in keeping together a championship roster as free agents earn big paydays with other teams across the league. To that end, the Seahawks have already seen several key members of the roster depart for more money elsewhere, including
Ken Walker, Boye Mafe, Coby Bryant and Tariq Woolen.
However, a pair of Seahawks starters turned their on field performance during the 2025 season into large performance performance bonuses are right guard Anthony Bradford and linebacker Drake Thomas.
For those unfamiliar with the performance based pay system under the current collective bargaining agreement, there is a pool of performance based pay that is split among the players based on an equation that takes into account the player’s salary and their snaps played. That means that lower paid players who play a large number of snaps have an opportunity to earn a significant pay increase as a result of their playing time, and for 2025 there was $542M that was split among the players.
In the case of Bradford and Thomas, as third year players during the 2025 season, each earned a base salary of $1.03M. However, under the performance based pay system, each of Bradford and Thomas more than doubled their earnings, with each finishing among the top PBP bonus earners in the NFL during the year by taking home a bonus in the amount of:
- Bradford: $1,098,394
- Thomas: $1,022,512
The PBP amounts are considered a benefit rather than salary under the CBA, and as such do not count against the salary cap.
