As in March, COVID-19 shutting down NFL market may push Jadeveon Clowney back to Seahawks
The free-agent market for Jadeveon Clowney continues to come back down to the team that’s wanted him first, and all along.
The Seahawks.
This week’s developments in Clowney Watch, football’s longest stakeout this side of awaiting a cure for COVID-19:
- The Raiders reportedly presented the three-time Pro Bowl pass rusher a free-agent offer intentionally low, as if they are on a fishing expedition. From Las Vegas.
- The Browns agreed with Olivier Vernon to renegotiate the defensive end’s contract for a new salary-cap charge in 2020. It guarantees Vernon, another top pass rusher, $11 million this year, according to ESPN. That almost certainly eliminates Cleveland as a potential suitor for Clowney. The Browns made what they felt was a competitive offer to Clowney last month.
So, two more teams apparently are out of the running to re-sign Clowney. He also has talked to Tennessee and was believed to have had interest from the New York Jets, among others.
He told Houston television station KRIV at a private workout in that city in May he was waiting for team facilities across the NFL to open to free agents. He is waiting to prove himself medically, in person with team doctors, to be worthy of the megabucks deal he’s been seeking for four months. Clowney had surgery for a sports hernia in January.
Team facilities remain closed to players until the start of training camps. Those for the Seahawks and most of the league are scheduled to start July 28 under restrictions and virus-testing the NFL had never fathomed until this pandemic.
It’s becoming likely it will be into August before Clowney will get the chance to visit other teams for physical exams. When and if he does, he may be able to perhaps leverage the Seahawks’ offer they made to him four months ago.
Through all this, Seattle remains where it has been with him since free agency began in March, and as the coronavirus pandemic then shut down Clowney’s market. They are waiting, and willing.
At their price, not his.
Same as in March
Remarkably, what I wrote in March, at the start of the NFL shutting down, still applies four months later:
The free-agent market has broken in all the ways Seattle needed it to in order to re-sign Clowney. He isn’t getting the money elsewhere he was seeking. He is the last, top, younger sack man remaining on the market, after Dante Fowler agreed to his free-agent contract with Atlanta Wednesday. And he is faced with choosing between a known team, locker room, system and style he has said he loves in Seattle and starting over in an unknown system for less money than he thought he’d be getting.
The Seahawks have none of the concerns the rest of the league does.
They saw last season, after his trade from the Texans Sept. 1, how easily he meshed with Seattle’s older and younger players. They saw how disruptive he was when he was healthy—and when he wasn’t. His best game and best by a Seahawks defensive lineman in years was in November in Seattle’s upset win at previously undefeated San Francisco. He mauled the 49ers’ offensive line and quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo. He was the reason the Seahawks sacked Garoppolo five times, hit him 10 times, and Seattle won to briefly surge to the top of the NFC.
Clowney first felt the sports-hernia injury in the first half of that exquisite performance.
This, from late March, also still applies:
The longer he remains unsigned, the better the Seahawks’ chances to re-sign the three-time Pro Bowl defensive end more from around $18 million or so per year believed to be Seattle’s offer range.
Re-signing Clowney as the centerpiece to an overhauled pass rush Seattle must improve in 2020 was the first of Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s and general manager John Schneider’s goals for this offseason. They made an initial, multiyear offer to Clowney in March. It was believed to be for about $18 million, as first reported by Sports Illustrated’s Corbin Smith.
Clowney, 27, was seeking $20 million or more per season in his first chance at free agency. But he wasn’t counting on a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic shutting down the NFL market and the entire U.S. at the same time he was recovering from his core surgery.
An attractive alternative
Each passing week an alternative becomes more attractive for Clowney: a one-year contract. He could essentially sign a lower deal for the 2020 season then get a do-over in free agency in March. He would still be at a prime age, 28. Presumably, he would not be coming off another surgery.
And we all hope the coronavirus isn’t still shutting down the country by then.
The most competitive teams, the ones Clowney has said he wants to play for because he wants to play in the Super Bowl for the first time, don’t have the salary cap space in July to give Clowney anything near what he’s been seeking in a one-year deal. They’ve already used their cap space to form the rest of their 2020 roster by now.
Of the eight teams with the most salary-cap space for this year, according to overthecap.com, Philadelphia ($24.7 million) is the only one that did not having a losing record last year.
One-year contracts prohibit teams from prorating bonus money and spreading more team-friendly cap charges into future seasons, as they can and do with multiyear deals.
The team that makes the most sense for Clowney on a one-year deal? The Seahawks.
They have just under $14 million in cap space, according to overthecap.com. That does not include the millions Seattle will need to sign the rest of its eight draft choices in the next few weeks.
Yet NFL teams have since the beginning of the salary-cap era in the 1990s found ways to create cap room to add players they really want. Seattle can cut veterans, ask quarterback Russell Wilson to restructure his team-leading $140 million contract or make over moves to find room for Clowney. Wilson restructured his deal and turned $6.26 million of base salary into prorated bonus money in 2017 so the Seahawks could trade for Pro Bowl left tackle Duane Brown.
The fit
Of all years, this is the wrong one for Clowney to sign a new team for only one season.
It would be his third team in less than a year. He will not have had the usual organized team activities (OTAs) and practices to acclimate himself. No player will. The league canceled those offseason practices for all teams because of COVID-19. He would be adjusting to new teammates, a new play-calling system, new coaches and new locker room in a condensed period before a regular season that may not happen in full.
He has said he fits the Seahawks’ 4-3 scheme as a hand-on-the-ground end, what he was starring in college at South Carolina before become the league’s top overall draft choice by Houston in 2014. Fits it better than he says he fit the Texans’ 3-4 as an outside linebacker through the 2019 season.
He’s already told Schneider he loves the Seahawks and hopes to work out a way to return. He went upstairs to the GM’s office in Seahawks’ headquarters to tell Schneider that the day after the playoff loss at Green Bay in January.
Clowney reiterated that to KRIV in Houston in May.
“I love Seattle,” he said. “I love everybody on that coaching staff.”
“You know, I hope we can work something out, if anything happens,” Clowney told Mark Berman, the sports director at Fox 26 in Houston in May. “I did like it up there. I love Russ (Russell Wilson). I love all the guys I played with. J. Reed, B. Jack, all them boys in my D (defensive-line) room.
“I respect them guys.”
“J. Reed” is Seahawks defensive tackle Jarran Reed. “B. Jack” is defensive end Branden Jackson. They got tight with Clowney in the 4 1/2 months after the Seahawks traded with the Houston Texans to acquire the pass rusher Sept. 1 through Seattle’s playoff loss at Green Bay.
The Seahawks want him back. And, again, they need him. Only Miami had fewer sacks last regular season than the Seahawks’ 28 in 16 games.
It may be for $15 million. That’s $5 million less than he was seeking before his—heck, all of our—worlds ground to a halt in March.
It definitely is a most winding, unexpected road to get there. But the market conditions remain favorable for the Seahawks to get Clowney back for 2020. for Seattle to fulfill its first offseason priority, after all.
Even if it takes into the preseason to do it.
