Getty Jadeveon Clowney has yet to make his free agent decision.
The Seattle Seahawks appear to still be very much in the mix to re-sign Jadeveon Clowney. After months of posturing, The Seattle Times’ Bob Condotta reported that “odds [are] likely increasing” that Clowney will play another season with the Seahawks. The news comes after the Cleveland Browns opted to restructure Olivier Vernon’s contract which likely takes them out of the Clowney sweepstakes.
“Still waiting in the wings and available to pounce, with the odds likely increasing he plays another year in Seattle with every other option that falls through,” Condotta noted. “No, Seattle isn’t going to offer Clowney $15-16 million a year or so as it originally did. But the Seahawks can still offer a one-year deal that would allow Clowney to return to a place he feels comfortable and maybe set himself up for another run at free agency in 2021 (with everything these days written with the caveats that things at some point will be normal).”
Clowney’s Lack of a Market Could Push Him Back to the Seahawks
The News Tribune’s Gregg Bell reinforced the idea that the Seahawks are a likely landing spot for Clowney. Bell tweeted that the “conditions [are] in the Seahawks favor to re-sign Clowney.”
“Been saying, writing since January conditions were in #Seahawks’ favor to re-sign Jadeveon Clowney,” Bell explained. “They still are. Wrote this in @thenewstribune in March, at the start of the NFL shutting down for the coronavirus. Four months later, it still applies.”
The Titans Admitted That Clowney’s Health Is a Concern
With the Browns likely no longer a contender, the focus goes back to another AFC team that has continued to be linked to Clowney. Titans general manager Jon Robinson did not sound bullish on the idea of signing Clowney given the current meeting restrictions as a result of COVID-19.
“What I’ve seen on Twitter, him rushing off the edge and hitting that bag,” Robinson told PaulKuharsky.com. “Anytime you are dealing with whatever the contract is going to command, you want to make sure that the player is healthy, that you are able to allow your doctors to see him, to look at it, to make sure everything is going to be good.”
Robinson did discuss a hypothetical scenario of how Clowney would fit on the Titans defense. The question is whether the Titans are willing to take a chance on Clowney given his injury history.
“You’ve got (Harold) Landry, you’ve got (Vic) Beasley, you’ve got Clowney – hypothetically, to your point – you’ve got Jeffery Simmons, you’ve got DaQuan (Jones), who’s got some power rush, you’ve got (Kamalei) Correa who goes 100 miles an hour, you’ve got a lot of different pieces that you can move around,” Robinson noted. “And you’ve got athleticism with Landry, with Beasley, with Correa, you can drop those guys into coverage and send David Long, Rashaan Evans, Jayon Brown or whoever it might be. It just gives you a lot of chess pieces in that game.”
The Seahawks Have Refused to Rule Out Re-Signing Clowney
Despite Clowney remaining unsigned, the Seahawks have repeatedly said the team will not rule out a potential deal to bring back the pass rusher. The Seahawks have implied that the contract would have to be at the right price and on their own terms. Seattle is believed to have given Clowney competitive offers including short-term and long-term options early on in free agency.
So far, Clowney has turned down both deals, and it is unclear if a one-year contract in Seattle would be close to the team’s original offer. The Seahawks were unlikely to get in a bidding war for Clowney but the market for the pass rusher never materialized, putting more pressure on the defensive end than on Seattle’s front office.
Re-signing Clowney would give the Seahawks more confidence about their pass rush heading into next season, especially with the additional players they have signed. The question is whether Clowney is willing to take a one-year deal with the Seahawks for significantly less money than he was hoping.
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