Seahawks release Gabe Jackson

With the new league year set to begin on Wednesday March 15 at 4:00 pm New York time, all NFL teams must come into compliance with the 2023 salary cap ahead of the start of the new league year. With that in mind, fans had long anticipated that the team would make several moves in order to come into compliance with the cap, and on Thursday the Seattle Seahawks made a pair of those moves.

Gabe Jackson was at the top of the list for many fans when it came to freeing up cap space, and as Mike Dugar of The Athletic notes in his tweet, the team saved $6.5M by moving on from Jackson. This comes as no surprise, as Jackson spent most of the 2022 season in a rotation at right guard with 2019 fourth round draft pick Phil Haynes. Thus, when the Hawks signed Phil Haynes to a one year contract for 2023, the implications for Jackson became crystal clear. Seattle will recognize a $4,762,223 dead money charge for Jackson, of which $3,000,000 is a pro rated portion of the signing bonus he was paid in 2021. The remaining $1,762,223 as a result of having restructured his contract in 2022 in order to free up sufficient cap space to operate during the second half of the season.

Ben Burr-Kirven, on the other hand, has spent each of the last two seasons rehabbing from a knee injury suffered during the 2021 preseason, and may now have a chance to catch on elsewhere after the final year of his contract tolled when he spent the entirety of the 2022 season on the Physically Unable to Perform list.