How Leonard Williams just cut the Seahawks’ salary-cap task in half, what they may do next
Leonard Williams’ huge contributions to the Seahawks aren’t just on the field.
The defensive lineman who finished a dominant, Pro Bowl season last month helped his team again this week. He restructured his contract. The 30-year-old Williams agreed to convert salary money for 2025 into bonus cash up front. That move immediately saves the Seahawks $14 million against the NFL salary cap for this year.
Jason Fitzgerald of overthecap.com reported Williams’ restructure Thursday morning.
Seattle was $27 million over the expected 2025 salary cap of $280 million before this re-do. Williams remaking his three-year, $64 million contract he signed before this past season cuts in half the Seahawks’ NFL requirement to get under the cap by the start of the league year March 12.
Williams was to have Seattle’s fourth-highest cap charge for 2025, at $29.1 million. Only quarterback Geno Smith ($44.5 million) and wide receivers DK Metcalf ($31.9 million) and Tyler Lockett ($30.9 million) are scheduled for higher cap charges this year, though all those will also change.
Fitzgerald detailed how the Seahawks changed $18,745,000 of Williams’ salary to a bonus. The team also added two void years beyond the contract’s end date of after the 2026 season. That reduced Williams’ salary-cap charge from $29.1 million to $14.06 million for this year.
Kicking that cap-charge can down the road a year increases the accounting cost for the team on Williams’ deal next year. The restructure increases Williams’ 2026 cap figure to $29.6 million.
Next year the Seahawks will be deciding whether to extend Williams again to reduce that cap charge for 2026. The league’s cap ceiling is going to rise to likely approaching $300 million next year from all the NFL’s revenues, mainly in media rights.
Williams’ wowing play in new coach Mike Macdonald’s defensive schemes this past season, as an end, a tackle — and even a nose tackle dropping into pass coverage and intercepting Aaron Rodgers for a touchdown — suggest the Seahawks will extend him beyond 2026 this time next year.
Seahawks’ likely next contract re-dos
Seattle has some more work to do over the next five weeks to get under the cap limit.
Smith isn’t going to play this year at his current $44.5 million cap number. The team does not have a replacement for the starting quarterback, soon to be 35. That and Macdonald’s comments the day after this past season ended make it likely the Seahawks will offer Smith a new deal soon. He wanted one this time last year. When he and his agents approached the Seahawks about it, general manager John Schneider told them to wait a year.
“I want Geno to be here. I think he’s a heck of a player,” Macdonald said Jan. 7. “The first thing it always comes back to is: What’s best for the team? I feel like Geno is the best for the team right now.”
As a policy, Schneider in his 15 years as GM has re-signed Seattle’s foundation players in the spring or summer entering the final seasons of their existing deals. That goes back to Russell Wilson, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman and others in the team’s Legion of Boom Super Bowl heyday 10 years ago.
A two- or three-year deal for Smith, for perhaps $25-30 million per season, would lower his cap number for 2025 and allow the team to spread his cap charges over the length of the new contract.
Metcalf just turned 27. He will also be entering the final season of his contract this year. He’s in line for a huge, new deal of perhaps $100 million for three years beyond 2025. The Seahawks will be able to afford that if they are paying Smith less in a new, shorter-term deal while the cap goes up the next few years.
Lockett, 32, has said he wants to play an 11th NFL season.
It may not be for the Seahawks.
He talked after this past season’s final game last month at the Los Angeles Rams as if he’d played his final game for Seattle. He thanked everyone from Schneider and Macdonald to the cooks in the team kitchen for his 10 years with the team that drafted him into the NFL in 2015.
“That could be the last time you put on the jersey,” Lockett said Jan. 5 in Inglewood, California, following the Seahawks’ season-ending win at the NFC West-champion Rams.
“The cool thing is, the beginning of my career it started off against the Rams (in 2015), and maybe the last game of my Seahawks career, possibly, it ended against the Rams.”
He shrugged.
Lockett’s production and status have dropped the last two seasons. He’s the clear number-three receiver in Seattle’s offense, behind Metcalf and Jaxon Smith-Njigba. Smith-Njigba just tied Lockett’s team record of 100 receptions in a season, in just his second NFL year.
The News Tribune asked Lockett Jan. 5 in Inglewood after that final game if he would accept any reduced contract number — meaning, the league’s veteran minimum of $1.1 million — to stay with Seattle if that’s what the team offered. Would he come back at any price?
“Ahh...that’s an agent question,” Lockett said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of conversations. ...It’s easy to say that we want you back, but you still have to be able to have those conversations and figure out what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, what’s the role going to be, all that type of stuff.
“All I can do is enjoy the fact I’m about to have a (baby) girl,” with his wife.
Lauren is due to deliver their first child in May.
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 8:30 AM.
