Seahawks’ Schneider reveals insight on trading during NFL Draft

The NFL Draft is centered around the seven rounds of players who get their names called by the league’s 32 teams. But what really makes the draft weekend such a spectacle is that there’s another element of transactions that keeps everybody on their toes.

Details: 2025 Seahawks NFL Draft coverage from Seattle Sports

We’re talking about trades, something Seattle Seahawks general manager and president of football operations John Schneider is known to partake in during the draft.

Just ahead of the first round of the 2025 NFL Draft, he joined Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob for one last edition of Season 3 of The John Schneider Show and discussed some of the ins and outs of making deals when you’re also on the clock to make a pick.

Schneider said there are conversations in the hours just before the draft that prove to be valuable once the three days of madness are underway.

“The board’s all good, the board’s set, and it’s really just talking to other clubs,” Schneider said Thursday afternoon when asked what his day had been like. “Talking about parameters, if you’re going to move, which way you’re going to move, who’s leaning towards what… It’s like a foundation for negotiations so that you’re not just cramming while you’re on the clock.”

Schneider even revealed one other NFL GM he had been in contact with Thursday: Tampa Bay’s Jason Licht. Not that they had much to talk about. Four of the Buccaneers’ six picks are very close to the Seahawks: one pick after Seattle in each of the first and second rounds, two picks after Seattle in the third, and right behind the Seahawks again in the seventh.

That not only makes the Bucs an unlikely trade partner for Seattle, but they also didn’t want to discuss specific draft prospects either for obvious strategic reasons.

“We usually talk about the players and how you feel about guys and stuff like that when there’s a little bit of a separation,” Schneider said of his conversation with Licht, “and we were just talking a couple hours ago – we can’t even talk about anybody.”

A look at local prospects in the 2025 NFL Draft

Schneider mentioned that while teams don’t usually like to make trades with division rivals, that’s less of concern with draft picks. And while it’s easier to make deals with other GMs you may already have a good rapport with, there’s something else that has made trading picks harder in recent years.

“We used to go off of Jimmy Johnson’s trade chart, and that was much easier to negotiate back then,” Schneider said. “(With) the flood of analytics, everybody has their own (draft pick trading strategy). The analytics and the salary cap portion too, mixing that all together, and so everybody has different charts that they work off of. So the negotiations have just become a little bit more difficult.”

Hey, it could happen

At one point during Schneider’s conversation with Dave Wyman and Bob Stelton, he happened to mention the idea of trading up as a hypothetical scenario. Stelton didn’t keep a very good poker face with his reaction, which Schneider noticed, leading to this funny exchange.

Schneider: “Don’t look at me like we wouldn’t do that (trade up).”

Stelton: “Trade up? I’d be stunned.”

Wyman: “You think that gets said too much, that you don’t (trade up)?”

Schneider: “Yeah.”

Stelton: “Well, do you feel like that’s unfair?”

Schneider: “No, we trade back much more than we trade up. That’s a fact.”

After Schneider acquiesced, Stelton pointed out that he was talking specifically about the first round, as he knows the Seahawks are known to trade up at times in the later rounds.

“Yeah, it’s just easier back there. People are more willing to move around,” Schneider responded.

Hear the full John Schneider Show in the audio or video player near the top of this post, or in the podcast at this link.

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