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The NFL postseason gets started this weekend, with three playoff games on each of Saturday and Sunday. For the Seattle Seahawks it means a third matchup against the Los Angeles Rams Saturday and an opportunity to create a two game win streak against the Rams for the first time since Sean McVay was hired in 2017.
With the postseason here, that obviously means it’s win or go home, and at some point the season of the fourteen NFL teams still playing will end. For the Seahawks that ending could come as early as Saturday or as late as February 7, depending on how well the team performs. Regardless of when the season does come to an end, the Hawks are set to have 23 unrestricted free agents this offseason, meaning there will certainly be questions for the team to address. However, even with nearly two dozen members of the team set to be unrestricted free agents, many of those are players who were not significant contributors over the course of the 2020 season. In fact, three of the free agents did not even set foot on the field at all for the Hawks during the regular season, including Branden Jackson, Phillip Dorsett and Josh Gordon, while Geno Smith and Lano Hill combined for just 108 snaps between them.
On the flip side, several of the free agents are key members of the team, and there is certain to be significant discussion among fans regarding which of these players should be prioritized in order to be retained. Specifically, starters who are set to be free agents are:
- K.J. Wright,
- Chris Carson,
- Greg Olsen,
- Mike Iupati,
- Ethan Pocic,
- David Moore and
- Shaquill Griffin.
Three of those Seahawks - Wright, Carson and Griffin - made the PFF list of the top 100 2021 free agents to be, with Quinton Dunbar also making it to give Seattle four of the top 65 free agents to be per PFF.
Of those four, the PFF predictions are for Wright, Griffin and Dunbar to all return to the Hawks in 2021 on multi-year contracts, with Carson expected to depart for greener pastures elsewhere. Obviously it remains to be seen how things will play out, and with so much uncertainty regarding the 2021 salary cap until the league and union make an announcement on how much the cap will drop next season, there is unlikely to be much news regarding contract extensions across the league in the immediate future.
So, for now it’s time to sit back and enjoy however much Seahawks football is left in the 2020 season, with a long, uncertain offseason set to start in no more than a month from today.