There were enough good questions this week about the Seahawks and the NFL to fill another mailing bag. So let’s go.
A: There has been speculation for months that the Chiefs may be forced to trade Jones, a fourth-year defensive tackle who made his first Pro Bowl last season while Kansas City won the Super Bowl. Jones received a franchise label last spring, but has made it clear that he would prefer a long-term mega deal, something the chefs have not given him so far.
Speculation about its future will only increase now that we are approaching the deadline for players who have received a franchise tag to sign a new deal by July 15 or play under the terms of the tag – Jones n ‘ has not yet signed his tag – with their team could not negotiate with them until after the season.
Some speculation with Jones has also focused on the idea that chefs might not have been able to keep him for the immediate future if they had also signed quarterback Patrick Mahomes for a new contract, like Kansas City did so earlier this week, giving him a 10-year extension that makes him the highest-paid player in NFL history on a deal that could be worth up to $ 503 million.
The idea that a new deal with Mahomes might make it even more difficult for the team to keep Jones and force the team to trade him now.
But when the final numbers for this contract were released, it didn’t really change Kansas City’s salary cap for the next two years, and chiefs can easily keep Jones and his $ 16.16 million cap for 2020. – even after the agreement with Mahomes, Kansas City has $ 6.2 million of space available for this year (Seattle has $ 13.9 million).
Of course, this does not resolve the question of the future.
But it’s possible that neither party cares as much as the commercial rumors surrounding Jones may indicate.
As Joel Corry of CBSSports.com noted, this season marks Jones’ first chance to make a really big buck – the $ 16 million would more than double the $ 6 million he made until present in his career in the NFL. As Corry concluded, this could force Jones not to want to “take an extreme position,” like sticking out, instead of wanting to play on the tag for this season and let the future settle later (and may -being especially right now given the uncertainty of everything).
The Chiefs, meanwhile, have an obvious chance of winning another Super Bowl and Jones is a key part of this effort – he had nine sacks last year and 15.5 the previous year, totals rarely seen by a indoor defensive lineman.
At this point, the Chiefs would not get a player who would be logically better and improve their chances in 2020. And although they can get a lot of selection capital, that will not help them win a Super Bowl now.
In other words, before asking if Seattle would be interested in trading for Jones, we need to see if the leaders will even want to think about treating him.
What if the chiefs wanted to deal with Jones?
Well, given Seattle’s recent history of successfully doing summer blockbusters (Jadeveon Clowney in 2019, Sheldon Richardson in 2017), you can bet the Seahawks would take a look at it (or should we say, do their “due diligence”, the phrase roughly of the trademark at this point by Pete Carroll and John Schneider).
And in the case of Clowney and Richardson, the Seahawks were ready to face a player entering the last year of his contract and risked losing him after only one season.
Seattle has established tackle newbies to Jarran Reed and Poona Ford, but Jones is the kind of difference maker who deserves to be mixed up. Would a pack of Reed (Seattle have to create its own space to make such a move) and a few fairly large draw choices suffice?
The assumption here is that the Chiefs – being in real and realistic victory mode – will be wrong on the side of keeping Jones unless things get really ugly or really attractive in an offer from another team.
A: I guess the question here is about Shaquem Griffin, the third-year linebacker and the fifth-round pick in central Florida in 2018. As I noted in a recent projection on the list, Griffin does indeed appear as the one of the most intriguing “bubbles” players in the camp this year.
Griffin hasn’t created a linebacker yet, a place where the Seahawks have added three draft picks in the past two years – Jordyn Brooks, Cody Barton and Ben Burr-Kirven – to add to the pillars Bobby Wagner and KJ Wright then this year also adding veteran free agent Bruce Irvin.
I think a realistic depth graph in the camp would be Wagner, Wright (assuming he’s healthy after an off-season shoulder operation) and Irvin, with Brooks, Barton and Burr-Kirven as backups (the backups Killer B?) And Griffin fighting to get into this group.
Could Seattle keep seven lineouts while six is a more regular number if all prove worthy to be on the team?
The joker is Griffin himself and the role of hush rush that the team developed for him at the end of the 2019 season – Griffin played 14 snaps in both playoff games in a specialized hush rush package, earning a bag against Green Bay.
Or, perhaps, Irvin himself becomes more of a pass-rusher and doesn’t play as much strong linebacker (which would happen if the team actually moves Wright to SLB to make way for Brooks to WLB) and somehow opens up a square .
Admittedly, it will be a little trickier for Griffin to be on the list in the third year than in his first two seasons. The number of caps for recruits increases each year, and that of Griffin this year is $ 829,405, of which $ 670,595 if he was released.
And then there is all this extra competition.
Griffin has proven to be a valuable contributor to special teams in his first two seasons, although the number of special team snaps decreased at the end of last season, so that will be something to watch out for as well. (He got 32% or fewer shots from special teams in the last four games of the year after playing 74% in the first game.)
But one thing I mentioned deserves to be mentioned again – it seems likely that the training teams will drop from their current 12 to 16. And everyone now has training team eligibility, with teams capable of calling two players from the training team to the active roster each game day.
So if Griffin was not part of the initial 53 player lineup, I think the Seahawks would definitely sign him on the training team (assuming he clears the waivers, which is not a guarantee, but it should also be remembered that most players usually do).
So while there is still a lot of talk about the bubble players – and Griffin will certainly be one of them – I think Seattle’s hope is to keep all of these linebackers in the organization of one way or another.
A: No doubt, with each day the news seems a little more disturbing.
Reports on Thursday revealed certain additional NFL protocols for the season, which include a ban on players swapping shirts after games. This drew a quick and harsh reaction on social media from a number of players, including Irvin, who tweeted that “we might as well play two hands”.
While the NFL trying to prevent players from coming together after games after spending three hours fighting and blocking each other seemed definitely contradictory, it also shows how complicated it all gets for the league. .
The hope of the NFL in the spring, when the epidemic started, was to continue its off-season activities as usual and to hope that things had cleared up enough by the time fall was unfolding to continue its activities. seasonal as usual.
But every day it seems less likely.
