What Will It Cost For Seahawks to Re-Sign Ernest Jones?
The addition of Ernest Jones paid dividends for the Seattle Seahawks last season, but his stellar play could make him more expensive to re-sign.
Living up to his impressive track record of acquiring game changing talent at the trade deadline, Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider once again hit the jackpot last October when he dealt a future fourth-round pick and veteran Jerome Baker to the Titans for linebacker Ernest Jones, instantly galvanizing a struggling defense upon his arrival.
Though Seattle didn’t fare well in Jones’ debut against Buffalo in Week 8 and lost a heartbreaker in overtime to the Los Angeles Rams the following week, from that point on, coach Mike Macdonald’s defense transformed into a legitimate top-10 caliber unit. Finishing with six wins in their final eight games with their new standout linebacker gobbling up tackles and making impact plays in the passing game in coverage and as a blitzer, the Seahawks allowed 18.3 points per contest and saw dramatic improvements allowing under 100 rushing yards per contest, ranking fifth and eighth in the NFL in those categories during that span.
Along with way, Jones racked up 70 combined tackles, an interception, and a forced fumble. Based on Pro Football Focus charting, he ranked 11th among linebackers from Week 10 to Week 18 in solo tackles against the run, fifth in run stop percentage, fifth in run stop total, and 11th in yards allowed per catch in coverage, stacking up against the best of the best at his position.
Considering those immense contributions to Seattle’s second half surge and his youth at 25 years of age, Jones easily sits atop the team’s priority list to re-sign among pending unrestricted free agents, especially after giving up a fourth-round pick as part of the package to acquire him. But with free agency less than a month away from tipping off, whether or not Schneider finds a way to retain him on a long-term extension will boil down to the price tag, which remains a potential sticking point and may be higher than the team wants to pay.
What will it ultimately cost for the Seahawks - or any of the other 31 teams in the NFL - to ink Jones? Looking at the top contracts at the linebacker position in the present, the fifth-year defender presents an intriguing case study in terms of overall value.
Sitting atop the highest paid linebacker hierarchy, Ravens star Roquan Smith and 49ers icon Fred Warner both are in the midst of multi-year extensions worth more than $19 million per year annually. Those two players have been the class of the position for half a decade, combining to earn All-Pro honors nine times and make seven Pro Bowl squads between the two of them, and it’s difficult to see Jones being in line for a similar pay day without any All-Pro or Pro Bowl selections to his name and significantly fewer interceptions/sacks on his resume.
However, particularly due to his youth, Jones’ agent could make a compelling argument to push for a contract in the vicinity of the four-year, $72 million deal worth $18 million per season that the Bears signed Tremaine Edmunds for in 2023. In comparison, Edmunds has more than twice as many interceptions as Jones and has been selected to two Pro Bowls, but Jones has nearly as many sacks and produced nearly an identical number of combined tackles (124 to 126) per 17 games per season since entering the league, offering quite similar contributions on the field.
As for the next three players behind Smith, Warner, and Edmunds on the linebacker pay scale, Bills starter Matt Milano has been dogged by injuries in recent years after making an All-Pro team in 2022 and signed his latest two-year deal nearly five years older than Jones will be pursuing an extension of his own, while Patrick Queen struggled in his first three seasons before a breakout year in 2023, ironically finding his groove in Macdonald’s defense in Baltimore before going to Pittsburgh as a free agent last spring. Browns linebacker Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah has just one season with more than 76 tackles and fewer interceptions than Jones in the same number of seasons as well.
In the scheme of things, from a negotiation standpoint, Schneider and Jones’ agents would be wise to start in that zip code between $12.5 million and $14 million per year, the average salaries per year of Milano, Queen, and Owusu-Koramoah. The latter two players offer the best comps due to their combined two Pro Bowls and the age they signed their current deals, as Queen was just 25 when he joined the Steelers last spring as a top target in free agency and Owusu-Koramoah hadn’t even reached his 25th birthday when the Browns extended his contract, making that range a sweet spot for both parties.
Of course, as is always the case for a free agent, if Jones manages to hit the market on March 12, the price for Seattle to retain him could be pushed beyond that threshold due to other teams engaging in a potential bidding war. With most of this year’s free agent crop at linebacker either past the age of 30 or lacking a comparable resume of on-field production, he could emerge as the crown jewel, skyrocketing the cost to sign him in the process.
Keeping this in mind, Schneider and the front office should be eager to strike a deal before such a possibility can come to fruition, creating a sense of urgency for the Seahawks leading up to the NFL scouting combine when contract negotiations typically heat up leading to the start of a new league year.
