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Seattle Filled 17 Practice Squad Spots Without Meeting Anybody New
The Seahawks signed a full 17-player practice squad on Monday, and every single name on it was already in the building last week. Not one outside signing. Seattle spent Sunday cutting 38 people and spent Monday hiring seventeen of them back.
17
Players signed to Seattle’s initial practice squad Monday. Every one of them was in camp with the Seahawks last week.
Four of the seventeen count as veteran signings: Trevon Diggs, AJ Finley, Velus Jones Jr. and Rodney Thomas II. Teams are allowed six veterans down there. Seattle used four, and two of them are safeties, which is not a coincidence. There are exactly three safeties on the 53-man roster and one of them, Nick Emmanwori, still has not practiced since ankle surgery.
So Finley and Thomas II got released Sunday and re-hired Monday specifically because the position group above them is held together with optimism. That is not a knock on either guy. It is just how this works: you are the insurance policy, and the policy only gets written after somebody reads the fine print on the roster.
The draft class ended up neatly split. Three picks made the 53 in Jadarian Price, Julian Neal and Beau Stephens. Bud Clark is on injured reserve. The other four, Emmanuel Henderson Jr., Deven Eastern, Michael Dansby and Andre Fuller, all cleared waivers and are back downstairs. Eight picks, and Schneider still has seven of them.
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Seattle looked at every player the other 31 teams threw away, then re-hired seventeen of its own.
Diggs, for his part, has now been signed, released and signed again inside of two weeks, and is back in the third cornerback conversation from a slightly worse chair. He is fine. Everybody is fine. This is a Tuesday in September.
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Waivers
Atlanta Took the One Guy Seattle Actually Wanted Back
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Ivey signed as an undrafted free agent out of Ole Miss in May 2025 and then did the hard part: he made the initial 53 as a rookie, on a team that went on to win the Super Bowl. He appeared in two regular-season games and was inactive for the whole playoff run, which sounds like nothing until you remember he is 6-foot-6 and 274 pounds and was the last man out at a position where Seattle is thin and getting older. Athlon reported he was edged out by Connor O’Toole. That is a coin flip, not a verdict.
Seattle, holding the final waiver priority in the league, was awarded nobody. Thirty-one teams picked through the pile first, Atlanta grabbed three players including ours, and the Seahawks got the leftovers of the leftovers.
Losing your last waiver priority battle is the price of winning the last game of the season. Fine trade. Still stings when the guy leaving is the tallest edge rusher you had.
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AROUND THE COOP
Around the Coop
Jaxon Smith-Njigba landed at No. 5 on the NFL Top 100, the list voted on by other players. He led the league with 1,793 receiving yards and won Offensive Player of the Year. Four guys ahead of him. I would like their names, their addresses, and a moment of their time. Yahoo Sports
Jalan Gaines cleared waivers and was not re-signed to the practice squad, and neither was Jamie Sheriff, who had been around most of the last two years. The Hard Knocks finale about the cuts airs tonight. HBO spent five episodes teaching us these names and then the calendar took two of them back. The Spokesman-Review
Three guys everyone assumed would land on the taxi squad did not: safety D’Anthony Bell, cornerback Noah Igbinoghene and receiver Cody White were all left off the initial 17. Seattle carried seventeen bodies and found room for none of them. Somebody in that building has opinions. MyNorthwest
NFC WEST SCHADENFREUDE REPORT
RAMS
Puka Nacua finally returned to practice on Sunday after most of a month with a psoas injury. Myles Garrett did not. Los Angeles traded a haul for the best defensive end alive and he is watching from the side with the opener ten days out and an international flight in between. Sean McVay’s roster is a beautiful thing on paper. Paper does not have a knee.
NINERS
John Lynch says he recently had to ask a potential practice squad addition whether the man owns a passport. That is the level of roster-building San Francisco is doing this week: not forty times, not tape, just basic documentation, before a 16-hour flight to Melbourne for a September 10 opener. Every other front office is worrying about depth. Theirs is worrying about customs.
CARDINALS
Arizona held the No. 3 waiver priority in the entire league on Monday, a spot you earn by being genuinely bad the previous year, and claimed nobody. Third pick of every player 32 teams discarded, and they passed. Somewhere between finishing 3-14 and getting the reward for it, somebody decided the roster was fine.
SEACHICKENS TRIVIA
This quarterback signed with Seattle as an undrafted free agent in 1980 out of Milton College, a tiny Wisconsin school, and played the first 12 seasons of his 19-year NFL career with the Seahawks. Who is he?
Tap to Reveal the Answer
Dave Krieg. Milton College shut down early in his pro career and never reopened, so for most of his time in Seattle the school that produced him no longer existed.
Got a Question? Fire Away.
The mailbag is open and the standards are low. Roster math, practice squad conspiracy theories, grievances about a 1997 draft pick. Send it in and I will answer one, honestly, in public, with my whole chest.
Ten days to the banner. The roster is finally a roster. — The Rooster