The Seattle Seahawks restructured wide receiver DK Metcalf's contract to create additional cap space for 2024. While the team wasn't short on cap space for this season, they were looking ahead to 2025 and beyond where a significant salary cap crunch was looming. By pushing some of Metcalf's cap hit into future seasons, the Seahawks created more immediate flexibility.
Before the Seattle Seahawks kicked off the 2024 NFL season by defeating the Denver Broncos 26-20 in Week 1, the team restructured the contract of wide receiver DK Metcalf in order to create additional cap space.
The immediate question for many fans became why the team would make such a move. Is a free agent signing for which the team needs cap space imminent? Is the team simply looking to have additional flexibility through the 2024 season? Is a trade for a pricey veteran in the works? The reality, though, is likely much more boring. Simply put, the Seahawks and new salary cap specialist Joey Laine are likely looking not just at 2024 with this move, but more so looking forward to 2025 and beyond. Specifically, Seattle was not exactly hurting for cap space for the 2024 season, with somewhere in the neighborhood of $4M available prior to reworking Metcalf’s deal. However, while 2024 was not an immediate concern, 2025 was looming just over the horizon, and it wasn’t exactly coming with a welcoming smile. In short, with the Seahawks looking at being a not insignificant amount over the 2025 salary cap, the team would need to make some decisions in the offseason. Yes, any unused 2024 cap space could be rolled over into 2025, but even a million or two is little more than a drop in the bucket when the Hawks were looking at needing $25M in cap space for next season. Yes, the image shows Seattle a hair under $19M over the cap, but that is without the roster filled out, and without accounting for signing bonuses for the draft class or a practice squad, meaning that at the end of the day the front office was looking at needing to create somewhere in the neighborhood of $30M. Now, once past 2025, it’s smooth sailing, with nearly $200M of space available in 2026 and well in excess of that amount available in 2027, it’s unfortunate that the Seahawks couldn’t roll cap space backwards into 2025 to help cover the deficit. Well, in steps Joey Laine and his history of void years. The restructure of Metcalf moved $9.75M of Metcalf’s cap hits out of 2024 and into future seasons. Specifically, it moved $2.375M of his 2024 cap hit into each of 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028, freeing up $9.75M in 2024. The end result of this is that $2.375M of 2025 cap space, $2.375M of 2026 cap space and $2.375M of 2027 cap space were moved into 2024, and should that space not be used it will be rolled over into 2025. Now, Seattle certainly still needs to create more space ahead of 2025, but this is the first step in setting the team up for the future. There will certainly be those who are worried about the potential dead money and the possibility of dead money, but the reality is that even recognizing that dead money in a future season is advantageous from a cap spending perspective. In short, restructuring and pushing cap hits into future seasons lowers the effective percentage of cap for those payments. This is financial engineering and likely confusing, so in short, had the Seahawks not restructured Metcalf’s contract, his 2024 base salary of $13M would have constituted 5.09% of the 2024 salary cap. However, following the restructuring that same $13M will now cumulatively hit the cap as 4.56% of the projected salary cap over the life of the deal. Certainly 5.09% and 4.56% of the cap are not a huge difference, but the 0.53% of cap that is artificially created through this manner is enough to pay for a portion of the practice squad. Perform such a restructure on a handful of players and suddenly the team is effectively conjuring the cap space necessary to pay the practice squad out of thin air. Yes, it doesn’t come without risk, as a significant injury to Metcalf could lead to the team moving on and taking a dead cap hit, but even then the team would have recognized some percentage of cap benefit by pushing the hits into future seasons, even if the full 0.53% benefit never materializes. And, yes, there are certainly those in the back of the room who are screaming that the Seahawks shouldn’t manage their salary cap the way the Saints have over recent seasons because the Saints have been mired in cap hell for several seasons and as a result have struggled to put a competitive team on the field. However, the reality is that over the past four seasons here is how the Saints match up against the Seahawks: In short, the Seahawks and Saints have the exact same regular season record over the past four seasons, in spite of the wildly different cap management strategies. For those who might be compelled to argue that the four-year window was cherry picked, feel free to go back further and compare how the two teams fared in the latter part of the last decade. In the meantime, it might make sense to stop waiting for teams like the Niners and Rams to implode for aggressively managing their salary caps, because over the past seven seasons San Francisco and Los Angeles have each won the NFC Championship game more times than the Seahawks have won any kind of playoff game.
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