Seattle Seahawks: 5 Players on roster bubble feeling pressure
By Samuel Teets
The Seattle Seahawks have added a bunch of additions through free agency and the draft, which has put a lot of pressure on these five players.
This has been a busy offseason for the Seattle Seahawks. The team made a few moves but was fairly conservative in free agency, initially. Then Seattle added 11 players in the draft and went on to pick up a few late free-agent additions in a flurry of smart moves.
With all of these additions, some players are inevitably going to be pushed outside of the roster bubble when it comes time to trim the roster.
The following players will all have the opportunity to make the final Seahawks roster, but they will need to prove they’re worthy of spots. You could say some of these guys are beginning to sink down the depth chart because of offseason additions. That means they will have to turn heads this summer if they want to claim spots on the final roster.
Paxton Lynch, QB
The Seahawks don’t like to carry a lot of depth behind Russell Wilson. Wilson has started in every game during his seven-year career, 112 in total, which makes the likelihood of the team actually needing a backup unlikely. Paxton Lynch also isn’t the second-best quarterback on Seattle’s roster right now — that would be Geno Smith. With Seattle’s tendencies to keep so few quarterbacks around when the season starts, Lynch has a lot of work to do this summer.
Lynch has perhaps been the biggest quarterback bust in recent history. The 26th overall pick by the Denver Broncos back in 2016 has only played in five games during his NFL career. Four of those games were starts and he finished with a 1-3 record, four touchdowns, four interceptions and a 76.7 quarterback rating. Despite being a first-round pick, Lynch was only in Denver for two seasons before the team gave up on him and moved on.
The Seahawks have carried questionable backup quarterbacks into the regular season before. Trevone Boykin, Austin Davis and Brett Hundley are just a few examples. However, Smith is more talented than those three and has much more experience than Lynch. While Smith’s stats from his days as a starter don’t exactly jump off of the page, they were pretty bad, at least he was able to start on a bad team for two years. Lynch was never even able to claim the starting job he was drafted to take.
If Lynch has a strong offseason and then outperforms Smith in the preseason, he would be Wilson’s backup for the season. However, up to this point, he’s shown no sign of being able to outdo another pro quarterback.