Spend It to Win It.

Seattle's bill comes due

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The Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl while fielding one of the lowest payrolls in the NFL this season. Inspiring!*

(*Don’t read the fine print.**)

(**The fine print: They’re about to pay through the nose.***)

(***And also be put up for sale.)

Anyway, happy Lombardi Trophy.

The NFL loves to tout itself as the affordable option for billionaires. If you want to own a sports team, but you worry about escalating labor prices (hey, who doesn’t?), then the NFL is for you. The league’s hard salary cap virtually ensures that you will never find yourself in a frustrating financial arms race against other owners who, I don’t know, feel like they want to sign the best players they can, or something.

But as the Seahawks are about to learn, the NFL accomplishes this competitive sleight of hand in the craziest way: It constantly attempts to behead whatever creature manages to crawl to the top of its slag heap.

This is anti-competitive, and, if you will allow me, also restrictive of capitalism and broadly collusive. Since I’m not an attorney and the NFL players have their own union to represent them, no one is listening.

Bottom line: The Seahawks just got really good. And that means that the NFL is absolutely, positively coming for them.

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Seattle completed an insanely great season, with a defense so stout it reminded people of A.) the Seahawks’ other Super Bowl championship in 2014, when the Legion of Boom dismantled Peyton Manning and the Broncos, and B.) the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, who had the best defense I’ve ever seen and won it all while asking quarterback Trent Dilfer essentially to just not screw anything up.

And here comes the bill! As noted by ESPN, two of Seattle’s best players, receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and cornerback Devon Witherspoon, are eligible for massive contract extensions that could result in more than $60 million in added payroll next season just between the two of them.

In addition, Pro Bowl wideout Rashid Shaheed, safety Coby Bryant and Super Bowl MVP running back Kenneth Walker III are all scheduled to become free agents. These guys are young, winning players, the kind around which teams build their cores — but they’ll also pull down something like $45 million a year (collectively), with several years guaranteed for each man.

If these stalwarts are all going to get paid, will the Seahawks be doing it? Or is it more likely that Seattle management will have to decide which expenses it can afford and which it can’t?

Oh: Team controlling owner Jody Allen, sister of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is expected to list the Seahawks for sale in order to fulfill Paul’s wish that his assets be liquidated in order to continue funding his philanthropic foundations.

That sale price could reach $7 billion or more — but the new owners, whomever they turn out to be, will almost certainly want a little payroll cost modification. And as we’ve established, a great way to do that is to buy yourself a salary-capped NFL team, not one of those Wild West clubs in the NBA or MLB.

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The most effective counterargument to what I’ve just written is two words: Kansas City. Over a recent six-year span, the Chiefs went to the Super Bowl five times and won three rings. It was as close to dynastic as an NFL performance is likely to be.

Looking back on that run, I’m increasingly tempted to call it a fluke — not of performance, but of time and place. Perhaps “rare confluence” is a better way to put it.

The Chiefs were blessed with a future Hall of Famer at their two most critical positions: quarterback and head coach. They also consistently revved on the redline when it came to payroll, bumping up against that cap, strategically cutting or trading very productive veterans (like Tyreek Hill) in order to continue feeding money to Patrick Mahomes, defensive star Chris Jones, Travis Kelce, etc.

Andy Reid’s keen sense of how to deploy Mahomes in ways that covered his offense’s flaws (and in a salary-capped league, every team has flaws) should stand as one of the great roster management achievements of the modern game. Mahomes and his teammates, but especially Mahomes, did the rest.

It ain’t easy. Seattle’s challenge, and it largely falls to general manager John Schneider to deal with it, is to figure out whom to pay on a team in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is often how it feels with defense-first teams, and I say that knowing full well what a fine season QB Sam Darnold just booked. Still — Seattle won it all because of its defense.

The realities of the salary cap are just about to kick in. As the Chiefs proved, those realities sometimes can be successfully navigated, but it helps when you build your championship aspirations mostly around the one guy.

What the NFL really excels at, in the end, is threatening team structures via the cap. Will Seattle get punished for being both good and young? Doesn’t sound right.