By Bob Condotta / The Seattle Times
RENTON — Twenty months after Tyler Lockett spent Christmas Eve in a hospital room wondering for a few minutes if he’d ever play football again he signed the contract of a lifetime.
“This is the day you wait for,” the wide receiver said Wednesday after signing a three-year extension with the Seattle Seahawks that reportedly includes $20 million guaranteed and a base rate of $31.8 million and a maximum value of $37.8 million. “Words can’t even explain how I feel.”
The contract was not only validation for the work Lockett did to recover from the broken tibia and fibula suffered in a gruesome incident against the Arizona Cardinals on Dec. 24, 2016 but also a vote of confidence from the team that he is indeed all the way back and worth paying more than $10 million a year to keep (which makes him the 21st highest paid receiver in the NFL on an average per year basis, according to OvertheCap.com).
Lockett said he played last season at “75 to 80 percent” when he made it through all 16 regular season games despite doing little in the preseason.
Lockett has also played sparingly in the preseason this year. But that’s been by design with Seahawks coach Pete Carroll saying the team has no worry that Lockett is back to his pre-injury form.
“He’s in great shape now,” Carroll said. “He’s ready to go and we’re really happy to be able to reward him with that (contract).”
Lockett on Wednesday recalled that when he first broke his leg “the first question I asked was ‘can I still play football?”’
Lockett, though, said his concern at that time wasn’t so much the money but simply that he realized how much he’d miss the game if he could never play again.
“I realized at that moment that if I couldn’t play anymore there were so many regrets that I would have had,” said Lockett, who is entering his fourth season with the Seahawks. “So many things that I focused on that I shouldn’t have even focused on or thought about. I should have just come out here and enjoyed playing football.”
Lockett can now do that as well as knowing he is set for life — he said his mother is coming to town to help him celebrate.
Lockett was a third-round pick in 2015 and had been entering the final season of his rookie contract — a four-year, $3.3 million deal.
Lockett becomes the second player who could have been a free agent following the 2018 season who has been re-signed by Seattle this summer, the other being left tackle Duane Brown, who also signed for three more years.
And Carroll said re-signing Lockett was in keeping with the team’s long-range plan.
“It’s been a part of the process and the plan that we’ve had to look after our guys and take care of then when we can,” he said. “It’s no different than what we have done in the past.”
Seattle last offseason didn’t extend receiver Paul Richardson, a 2014 second-round pick who ultimately signed a five-year deal worth up to $40 million with Washington.
At the time, that was viewed by many as a sign the Seahawks were picking Lockett over Richardson as a young receiver they planned to keep around, though some wondered if Seattle might get through the season first and see how Lockett plays in better health.
Instead, the Seahawks struck quickly, ultimately giving Lockett the same guaranteed money as Richardson received from Washington, and also about $2 million more in average-per-year and with the ability to again become a free agent in four years when he would be 30.
Lockett on Wednesday referred to Richardson as one of his best friends and said “we talked about this all the time. I’m just happy that he got his taken care of and I got mine taken care of.”
Lockett, who will turn 26 in September, has 137 receptions in three NFL seasons playing all but one regular season game in that time after breaking his leg against Arizona.
He had 45 receptions for 555 yards and two touchdowns last season and Carroll noted again on Wednesday his admiration for how Lockett handled his recovery.
“It broke my heart to watch him have to fight through the rehab throughout the year because he’s a guy that wants to be on the field every minute,” Carroll said. “He’s the first guy on the field and the last guy off and he wasn’t able to (do that). It just accentuated what it took for him to work through that.”
Lockett has also been Seattle’s primary kickoff and punt returner during his three seasons, returning two kickoffs for touchdowns and one punt, something that was a priority for the Seahawks when they traded up in the draft in 2015 to take him (Carroll, in fact, noted that no player in the NFL has more total yards — meaning receiving and running as well as returning — than Lockett. ESPN tweeted that Lockett’s total of 5,274 yards is indeed the most of any NFL player).
“They traded picks to come and get me,” Lockett said. “They showed me they wanted me here. From what I know in the draft they were the only team that told me I could do both returns and play receiver.”
Roles he will now continue handling through the 2021 season.
Seattle has some other pending free agents, notably Frank Clark, K.J. Wright and, well, Earl Thomas, who remains holding out.
Clark is generally considered the next most-likely player to get an extension.
Intriguingly, Lockett said when the team approached him about the extension he said Carroll told him “you know, you exemplify everything that we want in a Seahawks player and we don’t want you to be any different. We don’t want you to change. We want you to continue being the person that you are because being the person that you are is why we want you to stay here.”
That may have simply been a statement about Lockett. Or maybe, considering some of the other moves the Seahawks have made this offseason, a statement about something larger.
For Lockett, it said all he needed to know.
“The fact that they were willing to give me an extension because they see me in their future, that says a lot,” he said.
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