Big bucks for big punts: Michael Dickson gets large, new deal from Seahawks
What do you give a unique punter who has been an All-Pro and Pro Bowl performer, as a rookie?
Who has taken off on a brazen, unauthorized run for first downs out of his own end zone in a game, earning a nickname famous inside his locker room?
Who has drop-kicked field goals and onside kicks, and punted balls into trash cans from 45 yards?
The second-richest contract for punters in the NFL.
The Seahawks announced Friday they re-signed Michael Dickson to a four-year contract.
The new deal for the Australian and former Aussie rules player Seattle traded up to draft in 2018—the year he was an All-Pro and a Pro Bowl sensation—is believed to be worth $14.5 million, with $10.6 million of that coming in the first two years. That’s as Mike Garafolo of NFL Network first reported.
That average of $3,625,000 will be second-highest in the league among punters. Johnny Hekker, a graduate of Bothell High School, earns $3.75 million per year from the Los Angeles Rams.
Dickson, a 25-year-old native of Sydney, Australia, is entering the final year of his rookie contract. He earned $750,000 last season. He’ll earn $3,384,000 this year, and is now under contract with the Seahawks through 2025 at that whopping average of $3.6 million per year.
He should have made his second Pro Bowl team last season. He averaged a career-best 49.6 yards per punt and led the NFL with 32 punts inside the opponent’s 20-yard line. Those balls routinely landed and changed direction to the sideline on almost 90-degree angles, as if Dickson was controlling them with a joystick.
With incentives such as another Pro Bowl or All-Pro selection, Dickson could earn up to an NFL-high $4 million per season.
That’s big bucks for “Big Balls.”
That’s the nickname those around the Seahawks’ locker room immortalized Dickson with during his wowing rookie season three years ago.
The backstory begins in a place about as unexpected as the play that spawned the new nickname.
Dickson was minding his own stuff when coach Pete Carroll came up to him with an odd suggestion. Odd, considering they were not on a field. Or in a game or on the sideline. Or even in the Seahawks’ locker room.
The rookie punter and his coach were at the airport in London at the time, after Seattle’s blowout win over Oakland at Wembley Stadium on Oct. 14, 2018.
“And Pete came up to me and said, ‘When are you just going to run the ball?’” Dickson said.
The punter’s glib response?: “Whenever you ask me to.”
“Sometimes when there’s a gap, just take it,” Carroll told Dickson in the London airport.
“Then I told my special-teams coach (then Brian Schneider),” Dickson said, “knowing he’d be so against the idea. And he was.
“I told him and he said, ‘No! Don’t ever do that!’”
Carroll and Schneider didn’t ask Dickson to do anything but run out of the end zone for an intentional safety on fourth down with 2:18 left in a game later that 2018 season, at Detroit. The Seahawks were leading 28-14. The coaches decided Dickson would take the safety to keep Seattle up by two touchdowns late. That was preferred over risking a blocked punt and Lions touchdown or Detroit getting good field position to score one, since Dickson was lined up to punt along the back line of the end zone.
Instead, Dickson ignored Carroll’s and Schneider’s instructions. And common sense.
He took off running. He freelanced around right end.
Carroll’s reaction as Dickson took off: “A few” expletives, the coach said.
Quarterback Russell Wilson said he was scared.
But the fears and expletives turned to superlatives as DIckson ran free on fourth and 8 for 9 yards, to the Seahawks 12-yard line. Dickson’s audacious first down allowed the Seahawks’ offense to run out all but the final 6 seconds of the team’s fourth victory in five games that year.
Carroll jokingly called the accidental play “Aussie sweep.”
“I thought Mike was smiling as he turned the corner and he knew he could make the first down,” Carroll said. “He knew he was going to have to take a hit and he was thinking about taking care of the football. It was an incredibly beautiful play. Sometimes you have to improvise, and really good players seem to do it at the right time.”
So there’s another reason the Seahawks traded up in the 2018 draft to select Dickson in the fifth round.
“He is unique,” general manager John Schneider said the day he drafted Dickson to replace the popular Jon Ryan as Seattle’s punter. “He can do stuff with the ball we haven’t seen yet. ...
“This guy does stuff with the ball that’s amazing.”
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 1:53 PM.
