Seahawks GM Schneider’s revelation about a first-round pick

Feb 21, 2025, 1:43 PM

Editor, Seattle Sports

On the latest edition of Seattle Sports’ John Schneider Show with the longtime Seahawks general manager, Schneider told an interesting story that included a revelation about what went into a first-round NFL Draft selection from earlier in his tenure.

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Host Bob Stelton asked Schneider, who is also Seahawks president of football operations, how he balances his own evaluations of players with what analytics have to say about them.

That led to some fascinating insight on the process he went through before Seattle picked running back Rashaad Penny out of San Diego State with the No. 27 overall pick in the 2018 draft.

Schneider admitted that his initial assessment of Penny wasn’t as positive as that from the Seahawks’ research and analytics department led by Patrick Ward.

“The analytics part of it is – Rashaad Penny is retired now so I can tell you this story,” Schneider said. “The first time I studied him, I was basically like, well, level of comp isn’t very good and he’s got these huge lanes that he’s running through, and he’s big and he’s super fast, really explosive. And so I had kind of graded him down a little bit.

“Patrick and his group, the analytics guys were like, he’s actually the No. 1 running back on our board after contact. And I was like, I disagree with that. We got into it a little bit. I was like, nah, I don’t see that. So I was like, you know what? I’m gonna go back.”

Schneider said he then watched plays from Penny’s college career where he ran for positive yardage after contact was made behind the line of scrimmage.

“You just watch all those plays and you’re like, I didn’t see that,” Schneider continued. “So you can have an opinion going in just based on level of competition or what you’ve seen, or you’ve seen him play on TV and you have a preconceived notion of what the player is before you sit down and actually study him, right? So it’s like, whoa… I wouldn’t have thought that.”

Though Penny struggled with injuries while with the Seahawks, playing more than 10 games in a season just once in five years, he had flashes of brilliance on the field – particularly in 2021. That year, he rushed for 135 yards or more in four of the final five games the season, and finished with 749 yards and six touchdowns in 10 games. His 6.3 yards per carry in 2021 tied for the NFL lead.

Penny played just five games in 2022, then appeared in three games in 2023 with the Philadelphia Eagles before retiring.

RASHAAD PENNY CANNOT BE STOPPED. 62-YARD TD. #Seahawks

📺: #SEAvsAZ on FOX
📱: NFL app pic.twitter.com/VorOzU8W98

— NFL (@NFL) January 10, 2022

Covering “blind spots”

Schneider said analytics are “one of the catches” that help him form his ultimate opinion while assessing players.

“They’re projecting out what the player is going to be, but it’s also basically like an alert to what some of our blind spots might be based on those preconceived notions,” he said.

So back to Stelton’s question: How does Schneider balance things when making player evaluations?

“It’s really at the end of the day taking in all the information you could possibly take in, and then just going with, to (Stelton’s) point, what your eyes and your gut tell you. And that’s just through experience and building out the library over the years of players and people that that I’ve studied,” he said.

“And so, to listen to as many people as you possibly can, whether it is analytics or it’s an equipment person or a trainer or a coordinator or a running back coach… and then bringing that all the way back to exactly at the end of the day, what is it? This is how we envision the player. And then in the draft, it’s all about trying to figure out, like, how to acquire the player.”

The John Schneider Show airs live at 4 p.m. each Thursday during Seattle Sports’ Wyman and Bob leading up to the first round of the NFL Draft on April 24. Hear this week’s full conversation in the podcast at this link or in the video and audio players near the top of this post.