The Seattle Seahawks moved into compliance with the 2025 NFL salary cap this week by moving on from many of the players they had added to the roster, or otherwise committed to over the course of the past year.
Entering the week needing to shed roughly $7M of cap space prior to the start of the new NFL year at 4pm New York time on Wednesday, March 12, the Hawks quickly came into compliance by releasing a quartet of players Tuesday. Those players included:
T George Fant
DE Dre’Mont Jones
DT Roy Robertson-Harris
S Rayshawn Jenkins
Releasing those four players removed $27M of contractual obligations for the Seahawks, leaving the team with just over $16M of cap space available.
Now, for those readers at home wondering how a team that is $7M over the cap can remove $27M of obligations from the books and only have about $16M of cap space afterwards instead of $20M, the answer is because it’s the offseason. During the offseason only the 51 largest cap hits count against the salary cap, meaning that if a player whose cap hit is released, the player with the 52nd largest cap hit on the roster moves up a spot and their cap hit comes onto the books.
In the case of the Seahawks, releasing Fant, Jones, Robertson-Harris and Jenkins removed those $27M of obligations from the cap calculations, and in their place slid $3.72M worth of new obligations. (Author’s Note: For those curious, it’s three salaries of $960k each and one at $840k.)
With that being the case, the net cap savings of moving on from the four players released Tuesday was roughly $23M, making it easier to understand how the team was left with $16M of cap space after those moves.
Then came Wednesday, when Seattle released Oklahoma City Thunder fan and longtime Seahawks receiver Tyler Lockett. Lockett carried, obviously, one of the top 51 cap hits on the roster for 2025 as he was due to make $17M between base salary, an offseason roster bonus and per game active roster bonuses. With those expenses off the books, and replacing Lockett’s cap hit with that of the 52nd highest cap hit, the net savings from Lockett’s release is $16.16M.
Thus, adding the $16.16M of cap space created by Lockett’s release with the $16M of cap space the team had after the transactions Tuesday, the Hawks have somewhere in the neighborhood of $32M to $33M of cap space with the legal tampering period set to begin on Monday.
