I think Seattle is staying put in Round One
John Schneider doesn't always trade back in the first round, and I think his approach from 2010 to 2012 is much more indicative of what we'll see from the Seahawks in Thursday's first round.
The Seahawks’ first draft since trading Russell Wilson is also their most important since drafting him in 2012. I think that’s a reference point, too, not because I expect Seattle to draft a quarterback this year, but because it’s useful to look back at what happened the last time the Seahawks held a pick this high in the draft order.
The Seahawks were scheduled to pick 12th that year after finishing 7-9 the season before. Seattle did trade back, but only three spots, choosing Bruce Irvin. It was the fourth first-round pick Seattle had made under John Schneider and the first time the Seahawks actually moved back. They made their picks at No. 6 and No. 14 in 2010, choosing Russell Okung and Earl Thomas. They stayed put at No. 25 the next year and chose James Carpenter.
While Schneider has made a habit of moving down in the first round in the 10 years since then, even trading out of it entirely in four different years, I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do this year for the simple fact that Seattle is at a different point in team-building.
On Wednesday, I asked for TDA subscribers for draft-day predictions with the boldest forecast that actually comes true meriting a prize of indeterminate value.
I’ll provide two of my own:
The Seahawks stay put at No. 9 and draft defensive end Jermaine Johnson of Florida State.
The Seahawks don’t choose a cornerback in either of the first two rounds.
If you’d like to contribute your own prediction, you’re welcome to do so up until the start of the draft, but be forewarned that only paid subscribers have access to that post, which means this is a great time to sign up if you haven’t already done so.
The Seahawks aren’t rebuilding. At least not according to their coach, but they are at a very different point in terms of their timeline now that they’ve plunged back into the pool of teams searching for their long-term quarterback.
The equation changes in that regard, and while Schneider has never openly bought into the idea of a championship window, the fact that Seattle was willing to trade first-round picks for proven players reeked of a team searching for ways to maximize the chances of short-term success.
He’s not alone in that regard. In fact, the Rams literally made a big production about their willingness to do just that. The trailer they made starting Dennis Quaid and the dude from “Lost” is really, really well executed and sells the Rams’ lack of a first-round pick for a sixth successive season as part of a caper the team is pulling over on the entire league.
But trades aren’t the biggest reason the Rams won that Super Bowl. They played a factor, for sure, and I certainly don’t think they would have won it had they kept Jared Goff and opted against trading for Matthew Stafford, but the thing that gets overlooked by so many people — including me during the playoffs last year — is that the bulk of the Rams roster has been built out by drafting well in the later rounds.
That reality is tucked quietly into The Ringer story that we dissected in Tuesday’s newsletter talking about the increased propensity for teams to deal their first-round picks because of the Rams success.
“No team has been better at finding contributors outside of the first round over the past five years than Los Angeles.”
— Danny Heifetz, The Ringer
Heifetz cites a study from Dan Pizzuta of Sharp Football documenting this. Heifetz also pointed out that while the Rams haven’t had a first-round pick in any of the past five drafts, they have chosen 45 players in that time, tied for fifth-most in the league.
That sounds an awful lot like Seattle’s approach to the draft under John Schneider. At least it did until last year when the Seahawks made only three selections. In Schneider’s first 10 years as Seahawks general manager, the Seahawks chose at least nine players in all but one of those drafts and never chose fewer than eight. They didn’t make a first-round pick in four of those 10 years.
There’s clearly a methodology at work here, and given the relatively consistent success first of Seattle and more recently of the Rams, it’s worth looking at it. When those teams became consistent playoff participants, they didn’t stop valuing draft picks in general. They stopped valuing first-round draft picks specifically.
Some of that reflects the reality that they expected to be choosing in the bottom third of that first round. Some of it reflects the fact that a better team has fewer openings in the starting lineup which narrows the opportunities for immediate impact from a first-round pick.
So the Rams — like the Seahawks before them — made a habit of dealing away those first-round picks. The difference is that it while that landed the Rams a championship, the deals never vaulted Seattle back into the ranks of the true Super Bowl favorites.
Why? Well, most people will say the Rams made smarter acquisitions, but breaking down the list of deals and showing the cost in high-end picks, I’m not so sure.
If the Rams get an edge, it’s from positional value. They traded for receivers, cornerbacks, defensive ends and a quarterback. Those are the premium positions in the league. Seattle gave up two first-round picks and a third-rounder for Jamal Adams, a safety. The Seahawks traded a second-round choice for a defensive tackle in Sheldon Richardson.
But Jimmy Graham played a premium position as a pass-catching tight end. So did Percy Harvin and Duane Brown might have been the single best trade that Seattle made in all of its deals, acquiring him at the deadline from Houston.
I don’t think the Seahawks took the wrong approach in using their draft picks as ammunition to add proven stars. They were trying to get the piece that would put them over the top. The question of how the coaches used that talent is a different question entirely whether it was asking Graham to block or dialing back on the number of blitzes for Adams last season.