After 3 years of diminishing returns, Seahawks need to hit in 2016 draft
Apr 26, 2016, 9:28 AM | Updated: Oct 28, 2024, 1:08 pm
The Seahawks can build a championship team through the draft.
We’ve seen that.
Now, we’re going to see if they can replenish it the same way, and actually, it’s a little more urgent that it sounds.
From 2010 through 2012, no one in the NFL drafted better than Seattle under general manager John Schneider. No one has said that about the Seahawks’ past three drafts.
That’s partly because Seattle has traded away top-end picks first to acquire receiver Percy Harvin and then tight end Jimmy Graham. It’s also partly because it became significantly tougher for a draft pick to stick on Seattle’s roster.
But most of all, it’s because Seattle hasn’t been able to draft stars – or even starters – as frequently as it once did, and that’s got to change if the Seahawks are going to swim upstream against the parity that is legislated across the NFL.
Seattle won a Super Bowl and went back a year later in large part because of the assembly of cost-controlled superstars it drafted from 2010 to 2012. It wasn’t just first-round, blue-chip talents like tackle Russell Okung and safety Earl Thomas. It was fifth-round choices like safety Kam Chancellor and cornerback Richard Sherman. It was a second-round pick in linebacker Bobby Wagner, who received a league MVP vote in 2014, and then, of course, there was the franchise quarterback, Russell Wilson, whom Seattle drafted in the third round.
Each of those six Seahawk draft picks were named to a Pro Bowl within three years of entering the league. Not only that, but of those six players, only Chancellor had signed a contract extension by 2013, when Seattle won the Super Bowl.
In fact, it was that nucleus of young talent that made it possible for the Seahawks to reach back-to-back Super Bowls even as they paid Harvin $18 million to play in five games in the regular season and two in the playoffs. And that isn’t even a full accounting of Seattle’s cost. After all, the Seahawks gave Minnesota a first-round choice in 2013 and a third-rounder in 2014 for the privilege of paying Harvin all that loot.
Seattle’s talent was sufficiently inexpensive that in addition to acquiring Harvin, the Seahawks could afford to sign impact free agents like they did in 2013, when they added defensive linemen Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril.
But the bill has come due in Seattle. Wilson, Sherman, Wagner and Thomas are all among the league’s highest-paid players at their respective positions. And while it was the free-agent market that helped put the Seahawks over the top, it’s the draft where they’ll have to shop to return there. After all, that is the one renewable resource in a league where everything from the salary cap to the schedule is structured to make it tougher for a team to stay good.
And the Seahawks have the picks this year. They have nine in all, including four among the first 100 picks. Compare that to recent history when the Seahawks had six top-100 choices in the past three drafts combined.
Not that it’s reasonable – or even possible – to expect Seattle to sustain its hit rate from 2010 to 2012. But after drafting six Pro Bowlers from 2010 to 2012, just one player the Seahawks drafted over the past three years was chosen for that honor: Tyler Lockett, a third-round pick in 2015 who made the Pro Bowl as a kick returner last year.
It’s not just stars that have eluded Seattle in the draft. It’s starters. The Seahawks drafted 28 players over the past three years, only four of whom have started eight or more regular-season games: offensive lineman Justin Britt, tight end Luke Willson, Lockett and offensive tackle Michael Bowie, a seventh-round pick in 2013 who started eight games as a rookie but was lost off waivers in training camp the following year.
That’s the past, though. We’re talking about the future. A future that will be determined in large part by what Seattle is able to find in the draft this year.