The Seattle Seahawks have finally secured premier safety Jamal Adams to a multi year extension. After giving up a king’s ransom to acquire the disgruntled superstar from the New York Jets, anything but an extension following the 2021 season would have been a clear loss for GM John Schneider and Seahawks brass. However, Schneider and unsung star of Seahawks front office Matt Thomas, were able to lock Jamal Adams up for the next 4 years to help secure the defensive backfield.
Per Bob Condotta of The Seattle Times, Adams and Seattle had already agreed upon the framework of the contract as early as last week, however Adams was fighting for an extra 2 million dollars to be added to his guaranteed money. The deal looked something like this.
4 yr/$70 million with $38 million in guaranteed money
Adams was set in stone on $40 million in guarantees, and Seattle was not willing to budge on their offer of $38 million in guarantees. When a franchise tag emerged as a real possibility, Adams seemed ready to file a grievance, for which his case would be that he is a LB, not a safety. Obviously Adams’ thinking here is that he will be paid more money as the franchise tag estimate for an LB is around $14,791,000 while being $10,612,000 for a safety.
As of this morning, Adams struck a deal with Seattle as a result of Matt Thomas working around the contract obstacle like he has all offseason for Seattle. Both sides reached a compromise of adding Adams’ requested $2 million dollars in incentives, instead of Seattle being forced to pay more money than they wanted to upfront. The deal is now worth up to a max value of 72 million dollars, with the $2 million in incentives for stats, Pro Bowls and conference championship berths being spread out for $250,000 each year from 2022-2025.
Overall, this is a clear win-win situation for Jamal Adams and the Seahawks. Adams received money that quite clearly reset the safety market, with his base salary being a 14.7% increase to Justin Simmons top market deal from earlier in 2021, as well as a 33% increase for Adams in signing bonus money in regards to Justin Simmons. Not to mention, Adams has a $12.44M option bonus in 2022, which, if Seattle picks it up, will become fully guaranteed 5 days after the Super Bowl of that season(2022). The bonus gets prorated from 2022 to the end of Adams contract. If Seattle chooses not to pick up the option bonus, the $12.44M gets added to the 2022 salary, which is fully guaranteed 5 days after the Super Bowl of that year.
As for Seattle, they lock up their playmaker on defense, after edging by a close contract negotiation that looked like it could turn ugly very fast. While Seattle did maintain almost all leverage through these discussions, anything other than a contract extension would have been considered another one of John Schneider’s failed blockbuster trades in Seattle. All of that got pushed aside the moment they were able to secure their guy for $17.5M APY, setting a record for the safety market, and more importantly, not having to pay Adams more than future Hall of Fame LB Bobby Wagner. For obvious reasons, Seattle went into this negotiation knowing that they wanted Wagner to remain the highest paid player on defense, and rightfully so. Wagner has quarterbacked the Seahawks defense for close to a decade, and has engraved himself as a top 3 MLB in the NFL year in and year out. And while the guarantees and incentives do end up causing Adams to have a richer contract than Wagner, they have still established who the leaders of this defense are by the APY and the structure of the deal.
Seattle also benefits by having the opportunity to rework Jamal Adams fifth year option from his rookie deal, which would have incurred a $9.86M cap hit. The $21M fully guaranteed money at signing gives Adams job security since Seattle is highly unlikely to move on from Adams after one year and also incur a $16M negative to their cap. However the cap number is lowered, only at $5M, due to the base salary being kicked all the way down to $1M.
In the waning years of Adams’ contract, the cap hit does increase significantly, however Seattle can easily make either a pre June 1 cut/trade or a post June 1 cut/trade and still come away with a decent amount of money in their pockets(anything between $9.39M through $17.5M in the last 2 years of his deal).
All in all, Adams is locked in with Seattle for the next 5 years, gaining up to $80.44M if you include this years money. He resets the safety market, and Seattle gets a team friendly deal for their Swiss army knife to come back stronger and healthier in 2021 to help lead the Seahawks defense. Seattle has a ton of flexibility in this contract, particularly in the backend of the deal, and were still able to reward Jamal Adams with the money he wants.
Adams deal does however put multiple safeties on the map of contract extensions, particularly Jessie Bates from the Bengals, who is all but certain to ask for more money than Adams and set a new market value for safeties in the NFL.
Photo Credits: NFL.com
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