For most, the Friday after the Super Bowl marks the start of the first weekend of the long, dreadful period of life known as the offseason.
During the offseason there is football related news, as fans hype
themselves up for the coming season, expressing optimism in the players added in free agency and the draft, while downplaying the contributions and importance of those lost to other teams.
For the Seattle Seahawks, though, the Friday after the Super Bowl is a date which is critical to the contract structure the team uses to walk a fine line that gives players the financial guarantees they are looking for while skirting the funding rule of the collective bargaining agreement.
For those unfamiliar with the funding rule, it is Article 26, Section 9 of the 2020 CBA and reads as follows:
Section 9. Funding of Deferred and Guaranteed Contracts: The NFL may require that by a prescribed date certain, each Club must deposit into a segregated account the present value, calculated using the Discount Rate, less $15,000,000 (the “Deductible”), of deferred and guaranteed compensation owed by that Club with respect to Club funding of Player Contracts involving deferred or guaranteed compensation; provided, however, that with respect to guaranteed contracts, the amount of unpaid compensation for past or future services to be included in the funding calculation shall not exceed seventy-five (75%) percent of the total amount of the contract compensation. The present value of any future years’ salary payable to a player pursuant to an injury guarantee provision in his NFL Player Contract(s), shall not be considered owed by a Club under this Section until after the Club has acknowledged that the player’s injury qualifies him to receive the future payments. The $15,000,000 Deductible referenced in the first sentence of this Section 9 shall apply to the 2020-28 League Years only. This Deductible shall increase to $17,000,000 for the 2029-30 League Years.
That’s a whole lot of legalese, so what it boils down to is that if a team owes fully guaranteed salaries in excess of $15M in future league years, the league can require that the amount of those fully guaranteed salaries less $15M be deposited into escrow.
Thus, the funding rule combined with the frugality of Seahawks ownership, explains why the team has long eschewed giving players fully guaranteed salaries past the first year of the player’s contract. This has been standard practice for the Seahawks under John Schneider since early in his tenure.
So, rather than give fully guaranteed salaries past the first year of a contract, Seattle signs contracts that include effectively fully guaranteed money in the second year of their deals, with those effectively full guarantees vesting into full guarantees shortly after the season ends. This gives the players the guarantees they are looking for, while saving the Seahawks from depositing the second year salaries of players into escrow.
For example, when Seattle acquired Percy Harvin from the Minnesota Vikings, his six-year, $67M contract included $25.5M guaranteed. Of that $25.5M in guarantees, $14.5M was made up of a $12M fully guaranteed signing bonus, $2.5M of fully guaranteed 2013 base salary and the final $11M consisted of an injury guaranteed 2014 base salary that would vest into being fully guaranteed the Friday after Super Bowl 48, a game many readers likely remember watching.
In any case, with the Seahawks set to take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 in eight days, the Friday after the Super Bowl is just fourteen days away as of publication, and many of the contracts John Schneider has signed with bigger named players since the end of the 2024 season include this exact same structure of vesting guarantees.
Specifically, those players and the amounts of 2026 base salary which are set to become fully guaranteed the Friday following the Super Bowl are:
- Sam Darnold: $17.5M
- Cooper Kupp: $9M
- Abe Lucas: $6.956M
- Ernest Jones: $5M
- DeMarcus Lawrence: $5M
- Jarran Reed: $2M
So, for fans who have been predicting that Kupp will become a cap casualty for the second offseason in a row, the clock is ticking because once the Friday after the Super Bowl arrives the cap savings the Seahawks would recognize from moving on from Kupp shrink to just $500k.
