Seahawks waive top 2017 pick Malik McDowell, put not-playing Kam Chancellor on PUP list
Malik McDowell is gone before he ever truly arrived.
The Seahawks waived their top draft choice from 2017 as training camp began Thursday.
The defensive end from Michigan State who was supposed to be an inside and outside pass rusher replacing Michael Bennett by now instead leaves following an infamous ATV accident last summer, serious head injuries, and never having practiced let alone played in a game for Seattle.
The Seahawks also placed safety Kam Chancellor on the reserve/physically-unable-to-peform list. He stays on the roster and will collect, for now, the $12 million guaranteed to him this year and next. That’s even though a neck injury is keeping him from ever playing again.
Seattle also released reserve cornerback DeAndre Elliott and signed tight ends Kayaune Ross and Je’Ron Hamm.
McDowell, just 22 years old, may go down as the most unfortunate—meaning worst—draft pick in franchise history.
McDowell could seek another team to look with fresh eyes at his health, his injuries and his potential to return to the field some day. But the fact the Seahawks gave up on him despite pass rushers being their most pressing need for the 2018 season shows what their medical staff thinks of his playing future.
Seattle traded Bennett to Philadelphia this offseason. Then the team lost fellow Pro Bowl defensive end Cliff Avril to essential retirement because of a neck injury.
Cutting McDowell comes with his 2018 salary of $781,155 guaranteed to him and three years still remaining on his rookie contract. Such is the result of McDowell sustaining what coach Pete Carroll has vaguely termed was a serious head injury including a concussion in a mysterious ATV accident last summer in his native Michigan.
Carroll acknowledged during last season his team would not have traded wide receiver Jermaine Kearse and a second-round pick to the New York Jets last September for Richardson had McDowell been available to play. Richardson, a 2014 Pro Bowl defensive lineman with the Jets, played just the 2017 season for the Seahawks. He signed in March as a free agent with the Minnesota Vikings, making him essentially nothing more than a rental player for the Seahawks in a non-playoff season.
Kearse, the Lakewood native and former Lakes High School star from the University of Washington, had a career season debuting for the Jets: 61 catches and five touchdowns.
In April, without that second-round choice because of McDowell’s accident, the Seahawks drafted Rasheem Green from USC in the third round, to be the inside-outside pass rusher they had planned to make McDowell.
McDowell’s accident was weeks after he turned 21, and after he signed a four-year contract with Seattle worth $6.96 million with a $3.2 million signing bonus.
It was also weeks after he said this:
He’ll keep that signing bonus; he’s already got that. The Seahawks could, per league rules for the non-football injury list the team put him on last year, withhold parts of McDowell’s $465,000 base salary for last year that he had been guaranteed in the contract he signed in June. The Seahawks have not given any indication they did or will do that.
All Seahawks doctors allowed him to do physically from his accident in July into last fall was walk. His prospects on returning to the field were so far down the road the Seahawks allowed him to fly back home to heal in Michigan throughout all of 2017’s training camp and Seattle’s four preseason games.
In December, while the Seahawks were in Jacksonville to play the Jaguars without him, McDowell was arrested in Atlanta for disorderly conduct at a nightclub.