Seahawks' Drafted Rookie salary cap estimates

OverTheCap.com does a wonderful job tracking salary cap data for NFL teams. This fantastic website went ahead and estimated the Seahawks' 2013 eleven Drafted Rookies salary cap hits for the next four years.

In the new CBA, it is fairly easy to predict the base salary and signing bonuses for rookies as there is now a pretty simple slotting system. These numbers wont be exact, but they will be fairly close, and the differences will not be material in the sense of changing any roster/salary cap decisions for the Seahawks.

The entire draft class will unlikely make the 53 man roster, but if, somehow, the entire class did make the roster, the entire class would count only $5.1M toward the salary cap. Percy Harvin is already baked into the salary cap - consider him Half Free Agent/Half Draft Pick.

As you can see, most of the players will count less than $500k against the 2013 cap, and Christine Michael counts only $613k against the 2013 cap.

The Seahawks have over 70 players signed, but for Salary Cap purposes, the league only counts your 53 most expensive players during the season and your 51 most expensive players during the offseason when calculating salary cap spend/room. The "54th to 90th" most expensive players do not count towards your cap during the offseason.

As you can see in the attached chart below, the 11 cheapest of the 53 "most expensive" players count $5.9M against the salary cap. The drafted rookies will not be replacing these exact 11 players, but this serves as an illustration that this rookie class (when you take out the 1st round pick/Percy Harvin) will actually likely increase Seattle's cap room before the season begins.

How much cap room the class creates will depend on which current veterans get displaced.

Continuity is important in the NFL, but because of aging, decline in skill, injury, salary cap, and unrestricted free agency - continuity is a "pick your battle" type of decision.

The Seahawks choose to keep continuity with their 25-year old Strong Safety, while choosing to break continuity with 30+ year old players like Leon Washington. We will talk more about this in upcoming blogs - I've got tons of draft thoughts to share, but until then ...you know where we be.

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