Schneider on Seahawks’ 7 draft picks: ‘We’d like to have more,’ but trading isn’t easy

RENTON – The Seahawks have never made fewer than eight selections under general manager John Schneider. They’ve averaged about nine and a half in the seven drafts that he’s overseen.

That’s why the seven picks they’ll take into the start of this year’s draft may not seem like enough in the team’s view, even though it’s the standard amount.

“We’d like to have more,” Schneider said Monday at his annual pre-draft press conference when asked if having seven picks changes anything from previous years. “More is better depending on the draft. It changes the way we try to strategize because you’re not picking all the way through the draft.”

Seahawks have ‘kind of moved past’ Sherman trade | Waiting on Lynch

In addition to the 26th pick in each of the first three rounds, the Seahawks have two additional compensatory picks in the third round, giving them five of the first 106 selections overall. But they don’t have a pick in either of the next two rounds, having traded their fourth in last year’s draft to New England and having forfeited their fifth over offseason practice violations.

While he likes having so much capital in the early rounds, Schneider said it “hurts” to not have a fourth- or a fifth-rounder. He joked that it was “a little punch in the gut” when a reporter reminded him of that.

“You want to have picks all the way through,” he said before referring to the Browns’ league-high 11 selections. “You kind of look at Cleveland’s board like ‘Dang, it’s awesome.’”

As mentioned in this post, having three third-round picks gives the Seahawks some trade flexibility, especially given how teams can deal compensatory picks starting this year. Seattle has made 12 pick-for-pick trades on draft day under Schneider. Eight of them have entailed moving back. It wouldn’t be a surprise if they make another one this year to recoup a selection in the fourth and/or fifth round.

More Seahawks draft coverage

But Schneider said it’s easier said than done.

“You can strategize on it all day long, but it’s still not as easy to move around as people would anticipate,” he said. “It’s not like (the movie) ‘Draft Day,’ where they’re just moving all around.”

More draft notes from Schneider:

• Schneider reiterated that he doesn’t consider this year’s draft class to be as deep as last year’s, saying: “Last year it just looked really thick all the way through. This year there’s just a couple different gaps. That’s just for us. I’m not sure if it’s for every other team. We scout for our team and not for the league. So it’s just based on what our needs look like, and there appears to be more gaps in there. More so than last year, but to say previous years, not necessarily. There always are some ledges in there.”

• Schneider said Seattle’s draft board is mostly set, with likely only some minor adjustments remaining. “There’s some tweaking going on. We’ll have a medical meeting tomorrow night, so there’s some stuff that happens there where we have to pull some people off or we’re able to get some guys back from the previous medical meeting that had the rechecks at Indianapolis,” he said. “So it’s kind of tweaking a little bit by round like that, but it’s not anything significant unless something pops up off the field where we have to completely pull somebody off.”