Jamal Adams isn’t practising during training camp
Let’s just be honest about this.
Jamal Adams and Duane Brown are holding out. This isn’t a ‘hold-in’ as many are saying. The new CBA rules dictate that this is the present and future of NFL hold-outs.
You attend but don’t practise.
Financially it makes no sense for players to stay at home. Instead, they will report to camp and simply refuse to train.
Adams and Brown aren’t alone. T.J. Watt is doing the same in Pittsburgh. It’ll become a common occurrence.
What we don’t know is what happens if these situations are still unresolved by week one. Are players prepared to miss games?
In the case of Brown it’s unclear what his game-plan is. He turns 36 at the end of the month. At the end of the season he will be a free agent — yet he’s unlikely to get big money at the back-end of his career.
Trent Williams agreed a deal worth $23.1m a year in San Francisco — yet he’s three years younger. The Niners are also transitioning to a quarterback on a rookie contract, making it easier to reward players like Williams.
I suspect the Seahawks are simply prepared to call his bluff. Pete Carroll has been dismissive of the situation in press conferences, hinting at a desire to give Brown’s hold-out minimal oxygen. It’s a dangerous game though. If he does indeed miss games — as he did with Houston in 2017, when he sat out half a season — then it will seriously impact Seattle’s offense.
Already Russell Wilson can sense the danger:
“I mean, not having Duane Brown out there is a pretty significant deal… He’s one of the best left tackles in the game. The guy’s—there’s no argument—is as good as it gets. There is nobody more athletic, more talented, than he is.
“Age is just a number. It looks like he’s 28, 30 out there. He’s really exceptional. So smart, physical. Understands the game. And I think people fear him, to be honest with you, when they are rushing him, playing against him.
“We definitely want to get him back out there.”
“We need him game one, that’s for sure.”
These quotes passed through the media with little fanfare but this is essentially a bit of a warning shot from Wilson, who is clearly emboldened to speak up in a year where he’s already flirted with the idea of playing elsewhere.
The issue for the Seahawks, however, is obvious. They only have $44m in effective cap space for 2022 according to Over The Cap. That doesn’t include any salary for Jamal Adams currently. It doesn’t include Quandre Diggs either — another 2022 free agent.
They have only 50 contracted players for next year and face the prospect of needing to pay D.K. Metcalf in the next off-season.
Committing extra money and years to a soon-to-be 36-year-old Brown is probably not on Seattle’s agenda, despite his clear importance to the team in 2021.
Thus, they’ll likely take a risk that he decides to start the season. It’s interesting how much they’re talking up Stone Forsythe though. That’s not to downplay how he’s performed in camp so far — but it’s perhaps indicative of an awareness that they might be facing the prospect of needing a cheaper alternative in the near future.
I wouldn’t expect a new deal to be forthcoming for Brown unless the team panics. It should be an interesting week leading into the Colts game.
With Adams the Seahawks have put themselves in a self-created mess.
The trade itself was an act of desperation. A quick reminder — a year ago their attempts to improve the defense equated to swapping Jadeveon Clowney for Benson Mayowa and Bruce Irvin and trading for Quinton Dunbar. They hadn’t added any impact players.
The extreme expense of the trade was indicative of a team doing what it took to get a deal done because they ‘had’ to have someone. Adams was available, thus he became the someone.
It was a deal concluded as camp started, despite Adams appearing to be readily available in a trade dating back to the previous trade deadline.
You have to seriously suspend reality to think a trade like this couldn’t have been concluded weeks (if not months) earlier. Can anyone say with a straight face that the Jets wouldn’t have accepted the offer at any point in the prior eight months?
It was further evidence of a reactive franchise, operating on the hoof. They waited for Clowney and when that deal drifted away — they spent a fortune on the one impact defender who happened to be available, right before camp.
As has become the norm for this team — they were reactive not pro-active, trusting too much in their own process and recruiting ability. The Seahawks haven’t had a Championship off-season since 2013 yet they speak and act like it’s an annual occurrence.
Nothing emphasises this more than the fact they didn’t have a contract ready to go for Adams when the trade was concluded. Everyone knew he had to be paid. And everyone knew by not having a deal in place, they were surrendering all leverage to the player when talks eventually happened.
Act now, worry about everything else later.
The Seahawks had already seen this play out with the Texans (Laremy Tunsil) and Rams (Jalen Ramsey). They had been warned.
As time passed, the situation worsened. Budda Baker quickly re-set the market for Adams’ position. Joey Bosa and Myles Garrett smashed records for defensive average-per-year. Ramsey earned a $20m contract. Justin Simmons was paid. And now, more recently, Fred Warner and Darius Leonard have received contracts worth around $19m a year.
It’s become virtually impossible to pay Adams what the Seahawks clearly want to pay him. They are prepared to make him the top-paid safety, that much is evident. Yet they don’t want to stretch to a Ramsey-type contract or get near the Warner/Leonard average.
Yet Adams, quite rightly, should expect to be in that range. The amount the Seahawks paid for him via trade and the nature of the contracts being dished out suggest he has every right to expect more — regardless of his 2020 performance or fit in Seattle.
Thus, a stalemate occurs. And while Carroll attempts to play the situation down and an accommodating media allows that to happen — the reality is he’s two weeks into a hold-out now and the only obvious way to get this deal done is for one party to cave.
I suspect, from Seattle’s perspective, they are hoping to smoke Adams out by just waiting. They know it’ll cost him financially to miss games and he has little freedom or choice given the protection of the franchise tag in 2022.
This all sounds fine and dandy. However, as we’ve seen with Xavien Howard, forcing a player to sign a deal he isn’t happy with isn’t a precursor to harmony. Creating resentment would be unwise. Yet it appears to be a gamble they’re willing to take.
And yes, resentment is a distinct possibility. Think of it from Adams’ perspective for a second. They traded the house for him and made a public statement that this was a franchise player. Then when it comes to talk contract, they play hardball.
Ramsey, Bosa, Garrett, Warner, Leonard and others were all paid and all re-set markets. No delay. No resentment there. Browbeating Adams into a contract with the threat of financial penalties and the franchise tag simply doesn’t feel right.
Frankly — the Seahawks made this expensive trade and should be forced to live with the salary cap consequences if they intend to keep Adams. They have a duty to make this right. If they didn’t want to pay him, they either shouldn’t have bothered with the trade or they should’ve got what they can in a trade months ago and moved on.
They didn’t do that and appear to be rejigging the defensive scheme to get the most out of his abilities. They might as well call their bear fronts ‘Adams fronts’ because the change is inspired by one player. Although why they didn’t at least try and bring in a new defensive coordinator or consultant with a lot of recent experience in the system remains a mystery.
It also remains to be seen if they can find a way to make him effective without simply needing him to blitz 8-10 times a game — or whether they have the creative chops to deliver attacking opportunities without requiring an $18m linebacker to fill the A-gap as a decoy. Remember, Bobby Wagner blitzed a staggering 100 times in 2020 — fifth most in the league. In 2018, arguably his best season in Seattle, he blitzed just 41 times.
My prediction is a deal will get done before the season starts and one way or another it’ll be painful. Either Adams will be left feeling cold about the negotiation and the delay in completion. Or the Seahawks will end up spending more than they wanted to simply to nip this in the bud.
It doesn’t feel like a plan is being executed. Once again, it feels like the Seahawks are bumbling along — trying to stick everything together on the run.
It also still seems a little off to me that they’ll be paying a safety and a linebacker as much as they are — while playing hardball with the left tackle and lining up a rag-tag bunch of defensive linemen that some people describe as a deep group and I’d describe as a unit lacking game-changing talent.
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