Why Jamal Adams hasn’t signed yet, what the Seahawks are weighing to get it done
A young boy leaning against the metal barrier separating fans from field asked the same thing the Seahawks’ contract managers are right now.
“Jamal! Can I have your signature?!”
Jamal Adams turned from watching and not participating for the 12th consecutive training-camp practice. He smiled at the boy. Then he pointed at him, and made a promise.
“I gotchu!” Adams shouted across the 20 or so yards separating him from the thrilled, young fan.
“After practice.”
If only it was that easy for the Seahawks to get Adams to sign.
One month to the day before Seattle begins the season against the Colts in Indianapolis, Adams still hasn’t signed the contract the All-Pro wants to stay with the Seahawks beyond 2021 as the league’s highest-paid safety—and, as is now obvious, more that just that.
How possible is it that Adams’ contract stalemate with the Seahawks will continue through then, and that he will remain off the field and not play in the opener?
“I’m not even thinking about that, at all. I don’t know. I don’t know,” coach Pete Carroll said following Friday’s practice.
“I can’t even imagine that.”
The details
The Seahawks and Adams have known the parameters of his impending deal for a while now: likely between $16 million and $18 million per year.
Seattle general manager John Schneider came out to Thursday’s steamy practice and handed some neon-green team T-shirts to a security man to hand to fans in the same area as the boy who got Adams’ attention and autograph. He has known about $16 million would begin the range to retain Adams since he traded for him last summer.
GMs don’t send teams two first-round picks and a veteran starter, as Seattle did to the New York Jets, only to rent a 25-year-old star for two seasons and not pay him to stay longer.
Schneider and his salary-cap executive Matt Thomas have known since last year where the market for NFL safeties re-set, with Denver giving Justin Simmons $15.25 million per season on his new contract.
But Adams wants more than to be the league’s richest safety. He wants to be paid a premium as a unique force that transcends the position and its market. His 9 1/2 sacks last season, while playing with three injuries that required two surgeries following the 2020 season, set an NFL record for defensive backs. He wants to be paid more like, well, a unicorn.
How much more than $16 million per year?
Well, Schneider and Thomas also have Bobby Wagner’s contract to consider. Wagner, Seattle’s All-Pro linebacker, earns $18 million per year on a deal that ends after the 2022 season. Wagner has been leading the team’s defense for a decade. Adams has been here for a year.
The $17.5 million per year the Seahawks have offered Adams makes sense, to pay Adams a premium above the top of the safety market while keeping Wagner as the team’s highest-paid defender.
The holdup
Adams’ “hold in” continues now past halfway through training camp because of what is often the most complicated part of professional sports contracts involving tens and hundreds of millions of dollars: the last part. That’s the detailing of guarantees.
How much of the total value of his contract is guaranteed at signing? How much is guaranteed against injury at the start of subsequent league years? What is the cash flow to Adams in the first three years of this deal?
Unlike in the NBA or Major League Baseball with its guaranteed contracts, the player in his prime in the non-guaranteed NFL seeks to hoard all the guaranteed money up front in his first deal beyond his rookie contract—before possible career-altering injuries or reaching the age of 30, a danger age in this league.
That’s where Adams is now. He’s heading into the fifth year of his rookie deal. Two month before they traded him to Seattle last summer, the Jets exercised a fifth-year option on Adams worth $9.86 million for 2021.
The Seahawks in 11 years under Carroll and Schneider have preferred to back load their huge contract extensions for stars. They seek more manageable salary-cap numbers in the first years of new deals for foundation players, with ballooning cap numbers in final, non-guaranteed years.
That’s a hedge against paying large as a player ages, gets injured, or both.
If that star is healthy and rolling at the end of the back-loaded deal, the Seahawks tend to extend his deal again entering the year it is scheduled to end. That’s to lower the purposely ballooned cap charge at the end of the old deal into a more team-friendly cap number up front in another new, back-loaded contract.
See: Russell Wilson’s NFL-record $140 million extension with the team he signed in 2019, before the final year of his second Seahawks deal.
If that star has a major injury and has turned 30 or older at the end of his back-loaded deal, the team can cut that player at little or no residual cap cost.
See: Richard Sherman. The All-Pro cornerback tore his Achilles tendon then got waived injured by Seattle in March 2018, before his $11 million cap charge for that year applied.
Adams and the 2021 NFL star don’t want back-loaded contracts. They want maximum cash up front, before their health or team and league situations change.
The Seahawks don’t have as much cash up front this year. Because of the pandemic, the salary cap went down this year for only the second time since the league adopted one in 1994 (the other time was during the 2011 lockout). It dropped from $198 million to $182.5 million. That’s less buying power, and less money, to sweeten Adams’ new deal up front.
Thing is, by 2023 the cap is likely to be well above $220 million, an increase of $40 million or more per team from now. That’s because of the NFL’s new media-rights deals signed in February kick in with the 2023 league year.
Plus, the Seahawks aren’t negotiating with Adams in a vacuum.
Pro Bowl veteran left tackle Duane Brown, who turns 36 this month, has told the Seahawks he wants a contract beyond his deal that ends after this season. He isn’t practicing, either.
”We’ve got to figure that out,” Wilson said this week, “because we need Duane Brown.”
Quandre Diggs, Adams’ Pro Bowl partner at safety, is entering the final year of his deal. Wagner’s contract ends after the 2022 season. Same with record-setting receiver DK Metcalf. Through his first two seasons Metcalf has massively outperformed his rookie contract as a second-round pick and is due for a mammoth raise.
And some guy named Wilson has his contract ending after the 2023 season.
That’s further reason why a deal with more money later makes more (dollars and) sense for the Seahawks.
But not for Adams.
All this is why the deal’s not done — not yet — and why getting Adams to sign isn’t as easy for the Seahawks as it was for that kid.
This story was originally published August 12, 2021 at 6:05 PM.
