Michael Bennett will remain a Seattle Seahawk for the foreseeable future

What a stupid title for this post.

I am writing this, not having officially written the headline for this post, but knowing what it will read.

It’s not even really true. The foreseeable future is supposed to be as far as we can forecast. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of the Seahawks roster that will change in the next four years – the four years otherwise known as the one’s that Michael Bennett has signed for. Hell, the release of Red Bryant and subsequent signing in Jacksonville leave only Brandon Mebane, Max Unger, and John Ryan as holdovers from the Jim Mora coached Seahawks before the four years that Pete Caroll and John Schneider have put into this team. But we can forecast something with this team five years from now. I mean, chances are Russell Wilson will be the team’s quarterback, Marshawn Lynch will have a grill made of golden skittles, and Richard Sherman will have done to Skip Bayless what Dan Savage (NSFW)(Seriously).

Nonetheless, stupid title.

Michael Bennett is going to be around for a while, and that’s a pretty good thing. Bennett was very good this season despite playing barely more than 57 percent of the team’s defensive snaps. He had 8.5 sacks, and was solid against the run. He should get more snaps now that Bryant is gone, and while he’s not Bryant’s twin so far as the Seahawks defensive line scheme is concerned, he’s a pretty good functional replacement, and a very good financial replacement for Bryant and Bryant’s salary.

The terms of Bennett’s deal were four-years, $28.5 million, with some $16 million in guarantees according to USA Today. We don’t necessarily know the structure of the guarantees at the time of this writing, but that’s also not necessarily entirely important. The Seahawks have cleared a bunch of cap space cutting Bryant and Sidney Rice, and one could argue that by signing Bennett and presumably allowing him to play more snaps, they’ve also improved at the defensive end position.

And Bennett’s deal is hardly a bank-breaker. The level of discount he offered the Seahawks is perhaps worth a debate – I mean, this is after an offseason in which both Bennett and Cliff Avril had to settle for short-term, modest-salary deals compared to what they were expected to collect in free agency.

So the Seahawks have a guy who was arguably their top defensive lineman back, and Michael Bennett is rich. Well, Bennett was already rich, but he’s richer, and ostensibly happier. He may not be as rich as he could have been had he joined brother Martellus Bennett in Chicago, but then again we don’t know how his career may have been different were he to have signed with Chicago. There are a lot of things in the world which we don’t know how kind history will be. We know that it won’t be very kind to the title of this post, however, and likely the contents of it as well.