The stats for Seahawks receiver Jake Bobo in 2025 — two catches on two targets for 20 yards in the regular season, tied for 396th in the NFL — might paint him as an unusual target for a bidding war.
But it speaks to what he has meant to the Seattle Seahawks on the field and in the locker room in his three seasons with the team, and what the Jacksonville Jaguars think he could become, that the two teams had a brief battle for his services that Seattle won.
Bobo, 27, entered the offseason as a restricted free agent, a designation given to players who have three accrued NFL seasons whose contracts expire.
Being a restricted free agent means the players’ current team can tender them with a non-guaranteed one-year contract at a salary determined via a formula agreed upon in the league’s collective bargaining agreement.
Players who are tendered can continue to negotiate with other teams, but their current team can match the offer, or get draft-pick compensation if the player signs elsewhere, depending on the tender used. If RFAs are not tendered they become unrestricted free agents.
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Bobo didn’t seem like a slam dunk for a tender after injuries limited him to 11 games last season resulting in him just 117 snaps on offense and two catches after he’d made 32 combined in his first two seasons.
Bobo made $1.030 million in 2025 in a season in which OvertheCap.com estimated his value at $924,000, far off the cheapest RFA tender of $3.52 million in 2026.
There was even a report that Bobo would not be tendered by the Seahawks and would become an unrestricted free agent.
On the last day the Seahawks could tender Bobo, they did just that, giving him a right-of-first-refusal tender, which meant a salary of $3.52 million in 2026 if he made the roster and the ability to match any other offer he would get, but without getting compensation if he signed elsewhere.
Many might have figured that was that and Bobo would again be a Seahawk in 2026.
Other teams signing RFAs to offer sheets isn’t overly common, happening only twice so far this year.
But one of those occurred on March 20 when it was announced that the Jaguars had signed Bobo to an offer sheet of a two-year contract worth up to $7 million with $4.5 million fully guaranteed.
Tuesday at the NFL league meeting in Phoenix, Jags coach Liam Coen explained why the team wanted Bobo.
One reason, he said, was Coen remembering when he was an assistant coach at the University of Maine, and he scouted Bobo when he was in high school at Belmont Hill School in North Andover, Mass.
“I have a little bit of history with him,” Coen said. “I watched him dominate Boston College’s football camp in like 2017, 2016, something like that.”
It was likely 2016 given that Bobo committed to Duke early in 2017.
Also a factor was the presence of pass-game coordinator Shane Waldron on the Jacksonville staff. Waldron was the offensive coordinator for the Seahawks in 2023 when Bobo made the roster as an undrafted free agent out of UCLA.
“Shane coached him in Seattle,” Coen said. “So there was a connection there, there was a relationship piece that you said ‘OK, there’s a guy that could potentially help, obviously on offense but also on special teams and what that looks like for gameday and getting a helmet. That’s why that was intriguing.”
If the Seahawks might have hoped that tendering Bobo all but assured he’d be back, there was zero question about what to do once they heard of Jacksonville’s offer sheet.
The Seahawks had five days to match the offer sheet once Bobo signed it.
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But Seahawks GM John Schneider said the decision to match the offer wasn’t difficult.
He said the Seahawks were still working with Bobo and his agent to get a deal done even after he was tendered and when he signed the offer sheet with Jacksonville.
“Jake knew we wanted him back all the time,” Schneider said.
If nothing else, the offer sheet made for a clean negotiation.
That the Seahawks were matching Bobo’s offer sheet and would keep him was reported three days after he signed it.
Schneider said it took that long only because the Seahawks were dealing in the interim with finalizing the contract for Jaxon Smith-Njigba and holding draft meetings and that matching it was never in question.
“It was just like, ‘All right, let’s get to Monday or Tuesday and we’re matching that,’” Schneider said.
Bobo signed the contract later in the week and told Seahawks.com that: “I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Obviously, it looked like there was a shot I was going to end up in Jacksonville, but in the back of my mind, I was hoping the guys upstairs would make something happen, and they did. I was incredibly thankful for that.”
The $4.5 million guarantee is more than Bobo made his first three seasons with the Seahawks, an estimated $2.705 million, according to OvertheCap.com.
The per-year average on his new contract of $2.75 million on the base value of the deal ranks 66th of 274 receivers, according to OTC.
However, the new deal brought down his cap hit from $3.52 million on the tender to $2.31 million in 2026 and $3.125 million in 2027.
Schneider noted Bobo’s value on special teams — he had 134 snaps — as well as his blocking as factors that made the deal well worth it. Bobo impressed in the postseason when he had two more catches for 33 yards including a critical TD in the NFC title game win over the Rams. He played in the Super Bowl despite suffering a fractured metacarpal in his right hand against the Rams that required surgery.
“Jake’s a culture guy,” Schneider said last week during an appearance on Seattle Sports 710. “He had limited targets this year, but his effect on our team, you can’t really put a dollar amount on it — the way he affected our running game, special teams, the way he works, the way he conducts business every single day.”
Coen said he was sorry it didn’t work out to get Bobo in Jacksonville but added the eternal mantra of all coaches: “On to the next one.”
Bob Condotta: bcondotta@seattletimes.com. Bob Condotta is a sports reporter at The Seattle Times who primarily covers the Seahawks but also dabbles in other sports. He has worked at The Times since 2002, reporting on University of Washington Husky football and basketball for his first 10 years at the paper before switching to the Seahawks in 2013.