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Fans who liked what they saw from running back Mike Davis after his promotion from the practice squad can now rest assured that when the Seattle Seahawks open training camp Davis will be in the fold.
RB Mike Davis agrees to one-year deal to stay with the #Seahawks, source said. He took some visits but decided to stay in Seattle where he flashed last year.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) March 22, 2018
By adding Davis back into things for 2018, that will put him alongside J.D. McKissic, Chris Carson and C.J. Prosise, as well as whoever else the team adds between now and July.
In particular, many fans had wondered why the Seattle Seahawks did not extend a restricted free agent tender to Davis, making him an unrestricted free agent. The simple answer is the money involved. Whatever contract Davis signed is more than likely to be at or close to league minimum, which for someone with three accrued seasons like Davis is $705,000 for 2018. It might be a tiny bit larger, but I would be extremely surprised the dollar amount is for more than a million. In contrast, the lowest available tender for Davis had the team chosen that route would have been the original round tender at $1.907M. In short, the team likely saved around $1M by not tendering Davis.
Interestingly, the timing of resigning Davis is nearly identical to the timing of the resigning of Christine Michael in 2016. In 2016 Michael was a restricted free agent coming off a solid performance at the tail end of the 2015 season, but the team opted to non-tender him. That year free agency started on Wednesday, March 9, and it was reported that CMike would return eight days later on Thursday, March 17. In Davis’ case, free agency started on Wednesday, March 14, and the news this morning that he will return comes eight days after the start of free agency.
Two is obviously a small sample, but the situations are certainly very similar. Whether that is simply randomness, or whether the Seahawks put an offer on the table and gave Davis and CMike a week to see if they could find something better or for some other reason we can’t know, but the similarities are certainly intriguing.
In any case, when the specifics of the contract come out, I will be sure to put together a piece to let fans know for certain the details, but for now it is enough to know that Davis should at least be a part of the discussion in the backfield when the Hawks start training camp this summer.