If nothing surprising happens this weekend, the Seattle Seahawks may finally get their trading partner to offload Matt Flynn. Where to? The Oakland Raiders remain the only team in the race for the backup quarterback, which might mean the days of Carson Palmer with the team are numbered.
The Raiders don’t want Palmer anymore, or at least not in the salary ($13 million for 2013) he’s commanding and refusing to move off of. He’s willing to take a pay cut for a better team, which means the Raiders are either going to go with Terrelle Pryor, or find someone else. As both the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Buffalo Bills fell off the race for Flynn, the Raiders remain the only ones left to accept a trade for him.
While Flynn has always been one of these guys that seem NFL ready from the moment they came out of college, he hasn’t really gotten plenty of chances. There was that final game of 2011, with Aaron Rodgers getting a chance to rest, and Flynn putting up huge numbers against the Lions. But last season he came in as the favorite to lead the Seahawks, only to lose the starting job before the season began to Russell Wilson, and hardly got any meaningful snaps in 2012.
Now, with a salary of $5.25 million and a cap hit of over $7 million, the Seahawks are tired of having such an expensive backup when they know who the future of the franchise is. It seems that his 2013 and 2014 salaries ($8.25 million cap hit) were too much for both the Jags and the Bills, two teams that’ll probably have to go into the draft to search for a new quarterback. It’s good enough for the Raiders in their rebuilding plans, hoping that Flynn is as good as he seemed to be in his short stints on the field, while Carson Palmer goes looking for a contender.