I don't think he'll be very relevant, at least not in a positive way. I'd love to be wrong about this, but there are lots of good reasons to believe he'll contribute very little on the field, and his relevance will mostly be in his outsized cap hit and what is likely to amount to a waste of a roster spot in a defensive backfield so loaded with talent that it's likely that any player cut will play for for some other team and outproduce Adams. The potential opportunity cost of keeping Adams on the roster this season is pretty big.
Adams was already limited in his abilities -- very good at certain things, but not very good at others, including some of the most important for safeties, and he's too small to move to linebacker in the NFL. Before his injury in 2021, he was just not doing anything very well. And then he missed almost all of 2022.
In the article about injuries like Adams's 2022 injury that
@bileever posted, it says
I'm not sure whether the fact that his injury was extremely severe -- I have read a few times that the tendon separated completely from the bone -- improves or worsens the prognosis.
In any case, it would be unfair to expect him to produce much at all this season. Given that he didn't play in 2021 like he had previously, and he's attempting a comeback from an injury from which players frequently don't recover enough to return to being able to play in the NFL, I expect
very little from him in 2023.
If he had played all of 2022 and been as unproductive as he was in the part of the 2021 season he played, I'd have expected the Seahawks to designate him as a post-June 1 cut this year, leaving $9.67M of dead money on the Seahawks' 2023 cap, but freeing up $8.44M of cap space for this season, and then leaving $14.22M of dead money on next year's cap. But since he was injured, cutting him wasn't an option. Additionally, I have no way of knowing whether he would have been as unproductive in 2022 as he was in 2021.
I consider it very likely he'll be at least as unproductive in 2023 as he was in 2021, and very probably worse. So now let's jump to the next offseason and think about what the Seahawks will be able to do if he doesn't have another season-ending injury this season. And since "health is a skill," that is, players who have lots of injury problems tend to continue to have lots of injury problems
despite the selection bias of the players with the worst injury problems leaving the league working in the opposite direction, I don't consider another season-ending injury anywhere near as unlikely as we'd all like it to be.
At that point, the Seahawks will only have to take $7.11M in dead money on the 2024 cap and $7.11M in dead money on the 2025 cap if they designate Adams as a post-June 1 cut, or the full $14.22M on the 2024 cap and a fresh start in 2025 with no more vestiges of this disaster of a contract on their cap anymore if they prefer to do it that way.
And what would be the argument against that? "Look how many sacks he had in 2020 as part of a defense that was among the worst in recent Seahawks history, and never mind that he wasn't all that good at the things a safety is normally expected to do."
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't expect Adams to contribute much more as a Seahawk beyond what he already has. If it goes that way, my attitude will be something along the lines of "thanks for 2020 Jamal, and is there anything I can do to convince you to play for the Broncos next?" I sure hope it doesn't go that way, but I certainly wouldn't bet money on it not going that way.