Sunday night against the Arizona Cardinals the Seattle Seahawks pass rush was unable to do much of anything against Kyler Murray. They were largely unable to generate pressure, and failed to record a single sack over the course of the entire game and 48 pass attempts. In short, the bad pass rush was the worst it has been all season.
That makes the reports Monday that the Dallas Cowboys are open to dealing certain players very interesting.
This is an interesting one: The #Cowboys have made it known that DE Everson Griffen is available in a trade, source says. About half of his $6M salary is left for a team looking for edge help. Makes sense with Dallas’ record.
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) October 26, 2020
The Seahawks, of course, were one of the teams that was rumored to be involved in the bidding for Everson Griffen during the summer, prior to his signing with Dallas. In addition, as has been noted multiple times, the Griffen played his college ball at USC where his head coach was none other than Pete Carroll.
If the Seahawks are serious about potentially adding Griffen for the stretch run, then it would require some salary cap maneuvering, but nothing that couldn’t be handled. Specifically, as Ian Rapoport notes in his tweet, about half of Griffen’s $6M in salary is left. To dig into the details, Griffen’s $6M earnings this season come from two areas. The first is his $3M base salary, and the second is a per game roster bonus of $187,500 he earns each time he is on the gameday active roster.
Put that all together, and Griffen is due $176,471 each week during the season, and $187,500 each week in which he is on the gameday active roster. With Seattle having already had its bye week, acquiring Griffen in trade would add ten games worth of base salary, as well as up to ten games worth of per game active roster bonuses. So, putting the two together over the final ten weeks of the season, and it would cost the Hawks a little over $3.6M in cap space to add Griffen this week, and a little under $3.3M in cap space if he is added after the Week 8 game against the San Francisco 49ers but before the trade deadline.
That would require the team to shuffle some cap money around, as per the NFLPA public salary cap report Seattle currently has just $1,291,866 of cap space available for this season. That means that while Seattle seems likely to be one of the teams involved in the negotiations to trade for Griffen, until reports emerge that the team has created cap space to accommodate his addition to the roster, there’s not a lot of need to fret over his impending arrival.