The Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks have begun the process of assembling the roster that will look to defend their World Champion title on the field in 2026.
After the flurry of activity during the first week of free agency, things have settled down as teams have finished throwing around the silly money and have worked things down to where they are filling in the holes of the important, but lesser paid, role players.
For John Schneider and the Seahawks, part of that work this offseason was keeping
core member of the special teams, Brady Russell, and swing tackle Josh Jones.
Russell had been scheduled to be a restricted free agent, but after reaching agreement on a two year extension, he’s now set to be a Seahawk through 2027. Now, thanks to Aaron Wilson of KPRC2 Houston, how much Russell’s services will cost the team over the next two seasons is known.
It appears to be a pretty straight forward contract, with a modest $1M signing bonus and base salaries of $1.5M and $1.79M in each of the next two seasons.
However, astute readers may quickly notice that the numbers in Wilson’s post don’t quite add up. Specifically, adding up the signing bonus and the base salaries yields a total of $4.29M, which is $510k short of the $4.8M listed. Given that the Seahawks tend to include per game roster bonuses in the second year and beyond of their contracts, and the very often used $30k in per game roster bonuses would be $510k over the course of the season, it seems very likely that the missing piece is $510k in per game roster bonuses in 2027. Assuming that to be the case, the contract breaks down as follows:
- 2026: $2M ($500k signing bonus proration + $1.5M base salary)
- 2027: $2.8M ($500k signing bonus proration + $1.79M base salary + $510k in per game roster bonuses)
That’s a very reasonable contract for the special teams leader of the team, and shows how much they value his contributions.
As for Jones, his contract is even more straight forward, given that it is a one-year deal.
Interestingly, it is once again seen that summing the individual parts of the contract yields a total that is $255k short of the reported $4M total value. If that is an amount that jumps out, it is because it is exactly half of $510k, and means that $15k in per game roster bonuses over the course of an entire season would fill in the missing piece of the puzzle.
If that is indeed the case, this is what Jones’ contract will look like:
- cap hit: $3.955M ($2.245M base salary + $1.5M signing bonus + $255k in per game roster bonuses)
For those curious, the reason the cap hit is $3.955M instead of $4M is the three games Jones missed late last season. Whether or not per game roster bonuses count against the salary cap during the offseason depends on whether or not they are considered likely to be earned “LTBE” or not likely to be earned “NLTBE.” To determine which of those categories an incentive falls into, the league looks at the most recent season for the player and uses their performance as a baseline. That means that in Jones’ case, 14 of the per game roster bonuses are LTBE, with the other three deemed NLTBE. Now, if Jones stays healthy and dresses in more than 14 games, the additional games will hit the cap to the tune of $15k immediately.
