Personally, it was the apex of Geno Smith’s season.
Financially, it was the high point of his Seahawks career.
He’d just broken two of his franchise records for passing in a season. The veteran quarterback had just collected $4 million more in contract bonuses for that. He’d just led his team to a win over the NFC West-champion Los Angeles Rams. Everything was positive — other than the not-so-small fact that he and his Seahawks were missing the playoffs for the second consecutive year.
Yet when asked outside the visitors’ locker room at SoFi Stadium that Jan. 5 in Inglewood, California, for his outlook on the Seahawks following the just-completed 2024 season, Smith said: “I’m telling you man, this team is heading in the right direction. This team is on its way.
“That’s with or without me.”
Wait…“with or without me”?
Those words, and Smith’s future with the Seahawks, came to mind last weekend when Pete Carroll returned to the NFL.
The former Seahawks Super Bowl leader is back after one year out of football. Carroll, 73, agreed Friday to a three-year contract to become coach of the Raiders 12 months after Seattle fired him.
How does Carroll becoming the new coach in Las Vegas relate to Smith’s future in Seattle?
In a way that makes the QB’s “with or without me” hit a little differently than it did earlier this month.
Geno Smith and Pete Carroll
Carroll surprised many around the league by taking the Raiders job. The team appears as far away from a Super Bowl as any in the league.
Las Vegas just finished a 4-13 season. It fired coach Antonio Pierce. The Raiders are a distant last in the AFC West. They have no viable quarterback for the future. Their divisional rivals are Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs, Justin Herbert’s Chargers and Bo Nix’s Broncos.
Carroll needs a quarterback, or his return to the NFL is going to flop. And his Raiders are $92 million under the projected league salary cap for 2025, according to overthecap.com.
Within an hour of the news he was taking the Raiders’ job Friday morning, people from The Strip to deep into the Nevada desert and beyond were talking about Geno Smith. Specifically, about how he fits with what the Raiders want to do.
“For sure,” Vic Tafur, long-time Raiders beat writer for The Athletic, told The News Tribune from Las Vegas last week on KJR-FM radio. “I mean, if the price is right.
“I’m not sure what it would take in a trade. But obviously, in a new deal…like you said, they are really close. I think (Smith’s) got a lot of good football left. I don’t know his future is there in Seattle, what they think of him long term.”
He said of the Raiders and Smith: “Clearly, he’s another guy to put on the long list of guys they are going to look at in this process.”
So what do the Seahawks think of Smith long term?
Their coach is saying they love Smith.
“I want Geno to be here,” Mike Macdonald said this month. “I think he’s a heck of a player. The first thing it always comes back to is what’s best for the team. I feel like Geno is the best for the team right now.
“I’ll be involved with it, ultimately it’s not my decision. It’s a Seahawks decision. But, Geno knows how we feel about him and we love him as our starting quarterback, for sure.”
Then again, no Seahawks leaders, including Macdonald and General Manager John Schneider, are about to say publicly exactly what they will consider or are considering about Smith’s future and contract going into his age-35 season.
After all, the only reason Smith became the Seahawks’ starter three years ago is they said they loved Russell Wilson — then traded him.
Smith raised eyebrows of those who follow his stuff on social media last week.
Soon after Carroll got hired by the Raiders, Smith re-posted as an Instagram story from 2020. It was a photo of him with Carroll with the Seahawks…
Carroll has called Smith “one of my all-time favorite guys.”
Yet Smith on his way into this offseason lauded Macdonald. He said he loves the rookie head coach’s messaging, his consistency and his support throughout the Seahawks’ 10-7 season in 2024.
“He’s a man of his word. He’s a man of character,” Smith said after that final game at the Rams Jan. 5. “He understands how to lead. He understands how to push the right buttons and get guys going, like men. …
“Just the way that he carried himself the entire season.”
Smith noticed Macdonald’s public and in-house support while he was throwing 15 interceptions this past season, second-most in the league. Those included five particularly galling and damaging interceptions near the goal line. He threw the most red-zone interceptions in the NFL.
“Things weren’t always great. I made a lot of stupid mistakes,” Smith said. “And he (Macdonald) had my back the entire time.”
But Smith reveres Carroll.
When he signed with the Seahawks as a journeyman free-agent, back-up quarterback in 2019, it was after he’d been a teenager growing up in Miami and dreaming of playing for Carroll at USC. That was in the mid-2000s. The Trojans were in Rose Bowls and national college championship games seemingly every year then under Carroll.
“I always wanted to play for Coach Carroll. I was hoping I could get a USC offer coming out of high school,” Smith, who played for West Virginia, said 13 months ago. “Didn’t really happen.”
In the spring of 2022, Smith had completed his seventh consecutive season on a one-year contract at minimum salary. He’d been a backup for seven years for four different teams. He’d barely played since 2015. That’s when the New York Jets, who drafted him in the second round in 2013 then started him as a rookie, gave up on him.
That spring of ‘22 Carroll became the last man in the Seahawks franchise convinced, by Wilson personally, he had to trade the Super Bowl-winning, franchise quarterback. When Carroll learned from Schneider what the Broncos were offering to trade for Wilson — two first-round picks, two second-round picks, three veteran starting players — only then did Carroll agree to do it.
Immediately after the Seahawks traded Wilson, Carroll gave the Seahawks’ job to Smith. Not from game one. From day one of offseason workouts that spring.
Oh, sure, “Always Compete” Carroll said Smith would have a competition with Drew Lock, the former Denver starter the Broncos included in the Wilson trade, to succeed Wilson in Seattle.
But it was never a true competition.
Carroll valued Smith for the respect he had in the Seahawks’ locker room. Smith had earned it for professionally advising teammates off to the side, for how he bided his time behind Wilson from 2019-21 while Smith barely played. After Schneider and Carroll signed Smith in 2019, he didn’t play a snap as Wilson’s backup that year.
Carroll knew his younger players, post-Legion of Boom, were stunned the Seahawks had just traded their leader. The players were new, almost completely turned over from Seattle’s Super Bowl era of the mid-2010s. Carroll needed to instill confidence in the direction of the franchise that hadn’t gotten past the divisional round of the playoffs since its last Super Bowl appearance. That was the 2014 season.
Smith, the then-10-year veteran quarterback, was perhaps the most trusted player remaining in the room. So Carroll went all in on him.
Lock never had a chance. Carroll bet on Smith to settle the team and win.
Smith rewarded Carroll’s faith that year. It was the best season of his career. A regular starter for the first time in eight years, he broke four Seahawks passing records in 2022. Three of them were Wilson’s. Smith led Seattle back to the playoffs. He made his first postseason start of his career. He was selected for his first Pro Bowl. He led the league in completion percentage. He threw for 4,282 yards, with 30 touchdowns against 11 interceptions.
Throughout that ‘22 season, Smith said Carroll had basically resurrected his career, and that he owed the coach a lot.
The Seahawks then rewarded Smith with that three-year, $75 million contract.
But in 2023 Smith and the offense regressed. He went 8-7 as the starter and missed a game injured. Seattle missed the playoffs for only the third time in 12 years.
Yet amid the spiral, in late December 2023, before what would prove to be their final Seahawks game together, Carroll said this about Smith: “I love his story. He’s taught me so much, and I admire him for the way he’s handled the competitive part of this thing.
“He’s taught us about belief in yourself and how powerful that is. As clear as an illustration of anybody that I can ever remember,” Carroll said of Smith.
“He’s one of my all-time favorite guys.”
Fourteen days after Carroll said that, on Jan. 10, 2024, the Seahawks fired Carroll. After 15 years, team chair Jody Allen and vice chair Bert Kolde chose Schneider’s vision over Carroll’s of how to get the team back to the postseason.
When Carroll tearfully said goodbye in his exit press conference the next day, Smith sat in the front row of the Seahawks’ main auditorium. The QB listened glumly.
Months later, with Macdonald well into remaking the team, Smith said finding out the Seahawks axed Carroll was “a terrible moment.”
“Shoot, man, that day is probably a day that I’ll remember forever,” Smith said this past April, “just because of how things happened for me here.
“Obviously, Coach Carroll, a big influence in my career. He helped me out immensely when I came to this organization — and, really, helped me, thrusted me into the spotlight.
“For me it was kind of, just, a terrible moment to see someone that I love so much, have to part ways with him.”
Geno Smith’s contract
As is customary with large, veteran contracts across the league, Schneider and the Seahawks purposely back-loaded Smith’s three-year extension he signed before the 2023 season. The quarterback is currently scheduled to have a $44.5 million charge against the salary cap in 2025, the final year of his deal.
He’s not playing with a $44.5 cap charge.
It’s not conducive to the team’s massive need to improve the offensive line. Or its need to address the expiring contract of star wide receiver DK Metcalf, and the future of 32-year-old wide receiver Tyler Lockett. That contract for the franchise’s mainstay the last 10 years is also expiring.
Smith, Metcalf and Lockett have Seattle’s three highest cap charges for 2025. The team designed it that way, to eventually re-do in the final years of those deals. It’s the way teams work NFL math and budgets. They kick the can of cap charges down the road until the final years of contracts.
The Seahawks must be compliant under the salary cap, expected to be $280 million for 2025, by the start of the league year. That’s March 12. Smith’s contract says on the fifth day of the league year he is due a roster bonus. That’s a guarantee of $16 million for this year on March 16.
The Seahawks have three choices to reduce Smith’s salary-cap charge:
1. Cut him.
2. Trade him.
3. Re-sign him.
Releasing or trading Smith would save Seattle $31 million against the 2025 cap. A cut would make him a free agent, able to sign immediately with any other team at a new price. A trade would mean the team acquiring Smith would owe him the $16 million guaranteed March 16 plus his $14.8 million base salary for this year. The acquiring team in a trade would take on a $31 million cap charge for Smith.
At those prices, Carroll and his new Raiders may wait to see if the Seahawks cut Smith.
Which, if it happens, means the same question Macdonald, Schneider and the Seahawks had at the sport’s most important position last May when they again didn’t draft one would absolutely still apply:
What is their quarterback plan after Smith?
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