Seahawks entering draft with fewest picks in team history--by design--but with options
And the Seahawks thought last year’s draft was unprecedented.
“It’s going to be a fascinating experience,” coach Pete Carroll said 12 months ago.
“We have a lot of familiarity obviously and we have been through a lot, so many scenarios and all that, that we feel pretty comfortable.”
That was on the eve of an entirely remote NFL draft like no other. The Seahawks and every other team conducted the 2020 draft from the homes of general managers and coaches. They were linked with their assistant coaches, scouts, prospects, draft choices and other teams over internet communications from afar because the coronavirus pandemic shut down team headquarters.
Next week’s draft begins with round one on Thursday in Cleveland. Twenty top prospects and 3,000 vaccinated guests will be allowed to attend the league’s show live in a standing-room-only area next to the main stage down by Lake Erie and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, according to cleveland.com.
As Seattle’s coach said, Carroll and general manager John Schneider indeed have been through a lot together. This will be their 12th draft leading the Seahawks.
But they’ve never been through one like this year’s, either.
Not in the modern draft era.
Since Carroll and Schneider arrived in January 2010, the Seahawks have not had fewer than eight choices in any draft. The average picks of the Carroll/Schneider era is 9.5 per draft.
The Seahawks’ 105 picks in that span are the second-most in the league. Only Minnesota (111) has had more. The league average has been 86.6 picks per team over the last 11 years.
Carroll and Schneider have never had fewer than eight picks in any of their first 11 Seahawks drafts.
But this year, next week? With roster holes at cornerback, center, defensive tackle, third wide receiver and more, Seattle owns just three selections.
That’s the fewest picks in the Seahawks’ 46 years of drafting. Since the league dropped the draft to the current seven rounds beginning in 1994, Seattle has never ended up with fewer than five selections in any year. It happened in 1994 (when Sam Adams was their first pick), and again in ‘97 (Shawn Springs and Walter Jones headlined their draft that year).
No one in the league has seen this in the last dozen years. Seattle’s scheduled three picks are the fewest in the NFL since 2009. The New York Jets had three choices that year.
The only times a team has had fewer than five picks in the last dozen years: last year’s New Orleans Saints, the 2018 Tennessee Titans, the 2017 New England Patriots and the 2019 Jets. All of those teams had four selections.
Most draft choices since 2010
- Minnesota 111
- Seattle 105
- San Francisco 101
- Baltimore 99
- Cincinnati 99
NFC West draft choices since 2010
- Seahawks 105
- 49ers 101
- Rams 98
- Cardinals 80
This year, Seattle’s usually prolific pickers won’t be picking anything other than which channel to watch the draft on during round one Thursday. The Seahawks’ first choice this year isn’t until late in the second round on Friday, at 56th overall.
Sure, Schneider could pull off yet another trade involving a pick or three—or more. He’s made 81 deals involving choices in his first 11 drafts as Seattle’s GM.
Seattle and most teams use a variation of the old “Jimmy Johnson” draft pick value chart from the 1990s Dallas Cowboys.
That chart requires enough picks to package to move up, or high enough choices to entice other teams to move up so the Seahawks can trade down.
But this year the Seahawks don’t have the draft inventory to move up from late in round two. So any Seattle trading is likely to be going down, and on day three of this draft, to add to Seattle’s current other choices in the fourth round and the seventh round. Last year Schneider’s trades during the draft turned four picks into eight.
Still, the GM is going to be hard-pressed not to set a new Carroll-Schneider era low in picks for Seattle below eight this year.
What happened?
How did the pick hoarders’ cupboards get so bare for 2021?
By design.
It’s as unusual for the Seahawks as the time we are living in.
In the last 12 months, Seattle has traded with the Jets to acquire All-Pro safety Jamal Adams last summer, with Cincinnati to get two-time Pro Bowl defensive end Carlos Dunlap in October, with Las Vegas last month to acquire new starting guard Gabe Jackson—even trading back into last spring’s draft to get since-departed LSU tight end Stephen Sullivan in round seven. Those deals have dropped the Seahawks from eight to three choices next week.
The Seahawks see the already-wild crap shoot that each draft is as never being more of a guessing game than it is this spring.
As Schneider told NBC Sports’ Peter King last summer in explaining giving the Jets two first-round picks for Adams: “When you are picking in the late 20s (overall in round one every year because Seattle makes the playoffs), it’s a challenge.”
And that was before the pandemic.
By the time Schneider and Carroll traded their fifth-round pick in the 2021 draft—25% of their remaining draft stock for this year—to the Raiders last month for Jackson to address quarterback Russell Wilson’s stated frustration, the Seahawks’ plans for this offseason had become obvious.
Rely more on proven veterans to fill holes on the roster—and less than ever on this particularly unpredictable, unproven class of draft choices.
What about cornerback?
For more than a decade, Schneider and Carroll have used the draft as the foundation of Seattle’s success. They’ve stockpiled late-round picks and undrafted rookie free agents in particular, chip-on-the-shoulder guys who have been ultra-motivated to exceed the rest of the NFL’s expectations for them. Richard Sherman. Kam Chancellor. Chris Carson. Doug Baldwin. Michael Bennett.
Cornerback is a position the Seahawks are likely considering with their first pick next week, at No. 56 overall in the second round. Seattle lost its two starting cornerbacks from 2020 to free agency this spring, Shaquill Griffin to Jacksonville and Quinton Dunbar to Detroit. The Seahawks signed Ahkello Witherspoon to a one-year, $4 million contract from San Francisco and have D.J. Reed, a revelation last season as a waiver claim from the 49ers. But depth at cornerback is thin.
Benjamin St-Juste from Minnesota is 6 feet 3. Yes, he has Carroll’s requisite 32-plus-inch arm length. The Carroll-Schneider Seahawks have famously not drafted a cornerback whose arms are not at least 32 inches long.
But they also haven’t taken a cornerback in round one or two. Seattle hasn’t done that since 2007. That was when at 55th overall then-GM Tim Ruskell drafted shorter cornerback Josh Wilson.
Wilson started 24 games over three seasons for Seattle. When Carroll and Schneider took over in 2010, they traded Wilson before that season, to Baltimore for a fifth-round pick. That was one of the 81 trades they’ve made involving draft picks in 11 years.
That fifth-round pick in 2011 from the Ravens eventually, through another subsequent trade by Schneider with Detroit, became....Sherman, the prototype Carroll cornerback from Stanford.
That decision worked out OK for the Seahawks.
With moves like that for Sherman, stockpiling third-day picks, Seattle has made the playoffs eight of the last nine years, played in two Super Bowls and won the franchise’s only NFL championship.
But starting with the trade for Sullivan 12 months ago, Schneider and Carroll assessed the pandemic was going to impact football scouting and all of society for years, not months.
So that’s how they got to three picks for 2021.
But the lowest total in the NFL in the last dozen years, and the lowest total in Seahawks history, stings less knowing few drafts have had as many question marks as this one.
No need to remind you how the pandemic has wiped out pretty much every norm in society. That includes the league’s annual scouting combine in Indianapolis. That was supposed to happen last month. It got canceled.
Or...center?
For the second year in a row, prospects’ visits to NFL team facilities in the weeks before the draft also got canceled. Instead, scouts have been traveling to individual colleges’ pro days on campuses and watching workouts on live streams again this offseason.
“Things have changed a little bit in that guys haven’t been able to travel around and get to visit and stuff like that,” Carroll said.
The medical evaluations team doctors usually get at the combine? Those got canceled, too. They got replaced by regional medical evaluations that are more shared-info co-ops than a chance for the team’s own docs to set their own opinions on prospects.
That could affect a player the Seahawks may be considering if they keep that 56th-overall pick later in round two next week. Landon Dickerson from Alabama is considered the best center in this draft. He’s the Rimington Award winner for 2020 as college football’s best center.
Seattle needs a center. It re-signed Ethan Pocic, last year’s first-time starter at the position, for only this year and $3 million. Pocic was a backup guard and tackle for the Seahawks before 2020.
But Dickerson has had two major knee injuries, torn anterior cruciate ligaments. The recent one was in December as a redshirt senior during Alabama’s win over Florida in the Southeastern Conference title game. His first torn ACL was as a freshman at Florida State in 2016, when he was playing guard.
Dickerson also had ankle injuries that shortened two other seasons in college.
Pro Football Network’s Tony Pauline reported this week: “Several teams I’ve spoken with tell me they would not draft Dickerson in the first five rounds due to medical concerns. The long-term effects of prior injuries are as much of a concern as the short-term possibility of suffering a major injury again. I’ve also learned that several teams gave Dickerson a medical grade of 3-minus off medicals, the equivalent of a C-minus in letter grades.”
There are other peculiarities with this year’s draft prospects. Because of COVID-19, many top players opted out of the touch-and-go college season in the fall and winter of 2020. The many prospects in the second-level Football Championship Subdivision are only now playing what would have been their 2020 seasons. The top FCS prospects for this year, such as North Dakota State quarterback Trey Lance, skipped their seasons this spring to prepare for this draft. So they haven’t played a game in at least 16 months.
It’s all combined to leave the Seahawks with the fewest picks they’ve ever had entering a draft, and Schneider with the challenge of trading down and re-stocking later than usual in this one.
This story was originally published April 22, 2021 at 7:02 AM.
