Seeking Seahawks Draft Strategy

There’s so much hype surrounding the NFL Draft these days it’s grown into an incredibly lucrative industry that carries us through what used to be the off-season. We’ve now recognized there is no off-season anymore, and in fact, I enjoy many elements of the NFL Draft as much, if not more, than many stretches of the regular season itself. I recall taking my Dad (an original season ticket holder from the expansion era) to watch preseason games, and he openly wondered why anyone would bother paying to see the young guys practice. What I sensed then is what interest in the NFL Draft now shows to be the new norm: We want to know these kids! We want to see the next generation coming and drink up the bro-cred that comes with spying the next super star in his formative years.

But in being caught-up in the excitement of scouting reports, Sr Bowl practices and Combine measurements, we begin to see these things as wholly separate events in the NFL calendar, each with it’s defined purpose and singular contribution to the futures of the franchises. This, of course, is simply how it is viewed through the lens of the fan. For NFL GMs, the Draft is just another spoke in the wheel of a greater machine that is Roster Building.

Yes, with the creeping inevitability of a pulp fiction horde, the end is growing nigh. The building suspense of the Salary Cap and its impact on successful rosters is devastating and, by design, the single driving force in achieving, maintaining or ending a Championship run in the NFL. Luckily, the Seahawks have one of the best GMs in John Schneider to help 12s face the harsh realities of the salary cap era.

OK, so how does the Seahawks’ front office keep this party going and how does the NFL Draft fit in to the bigger picture? To understand a John Schneider draft, you must view it relation to other efforts being made to build the roster, as well as the opportunity costs associated with those moves. This’ where front office roles begin to be defined, but also where the terminology we use and the perceptions we have of the people within the VMAC begin to get confusing. While there’s been a fair amount written about Seahawks draft tendencies, positional values and team needs, what is lacking in the conversation is a clear definition of the motivations and strategies that tie them together as coherent tactics in a broader strategy, unique to John Schneider. This is the stuff of legend. Let’s explore!

Separating Myth from Math

As fans, we build-up our leaders into the heroes we need them to be. Believing that John Schneider possesses some secret knowledge that makes him special, makes us feel good and fortunate that he is ours, and not working for some other guys. Yet, we got him from the other guys to begin with. Schneids was taught what he knows and learned his lessons well. The cross-pollination of the Ted Thompson DNA in the NFL is unmistakable. It has common treads and its roots are buried deep in sound financial management and branding. These are top-down economics that start with committed ownership and continuity in the way you do business. College and pro scouting, free agency and the Draft are somewhere near the bottom of the list of things that make a winning organization, not near the top. This likely draws the most stark of contrasts between how fans view team building and how building a winning team actually happens.

*Fun fact: John Schneider is NOT a talent evaluator! He’s a talent appreciator. He does not make determinations about the quality of talent. He makes assessments of the ‘value’ of talent to Pete’s scheme and team relative to the marketplace, and what could be had as an alternative to slotting that player’s contract on his 53-man roster.

There are many examples of this axiom, ‘Management has greater value than Talent’, but the most obvious one is the AFC East where the Patriots have invited stars to walk while dominating the past two decades of division play versus teams like Buffalo and Miami that try to make splashes early in free agency and pick high in the Draft every year. Although the tides may be changing (I’ll believe it when I see it – looking at you NYJ!) Bill Belichick is not a rock star. He’s not a magician. He’s a mathematician. And so is John Schneider.

Yes. I get it. I understand it’s frustrating to marginalize the “It” factor while rooting for your favorite team. We all want to be special in the ways that matter. It’s a flamboyant world and we all want to stand out. No one is sitting in their CPA’s accounting office lobby yelling, “Oh HELLS yes! Did you see him just TOTALLY limit risk while managing those cost cuts as a measure of GL spending? He seriously molly-whopped that investment strategy! BOOO-YA!”

But this is what it is. Building a team isn’t about watching tape, it’s about watching the bottom line. Not sexy, I know. Just don’t tell John that…

This is the hard part for fans because it would seem to make sense that you collect the best players available, pay them well and keep them as long as possible. If you have holes in the roster, there is no problem a few million dollars won’t solve. And if you need to cook the books to get there, go ahead and push those chips all-in because YOLO, right??? Wrong! The drunken brother of “Win Now” is “Perennial Loser.” This critical philosophy is worn like a badge of honor at the VMAC. You might recognize this as the Pete-centric moto, “Win Forever,” but it is this common ground, this bedrock that is shared between Pete and John that makes it a winning formula for the Seahawks. Pete puts polish, face and a top notch public relations machine out in front of it, but it lives in the dirty work of cost control and risk management which have become the hallmarks of a John Schneider team.

So what is needed to build a winning team? As we approach the draft, it’s easy to identify what fans perceive to be holes in the roster, and we define these holes as “Team Needs.” Every industry guru, scout and would-be analyst start with this simple premise: You fill roster holes from the available talent pool, and you can prioritize these “needs” based on the current talent, or lack there-of, on the roster. Make sense? But while this makes for a fun exercise and some easily digestible groundwork for mock-drafters to ply their trade, unfortunately it just doesn’t happen that way in NFL front offices. It’s TOO easy. Too predictable and wholly 2-dimensional in the 3D world of the salary cap era.

So what DO you need as a NFL GM? Well, you certainly need to provide your coaching staff with the key cogs it requires to make their vision a reality on the field. You need to identify those players best suited to do that, and you need to be able to pay them for a long enough period of time to put it all together in a Championship run. Those are your only real needs. Note there is nothing player-specific here at all. It sounds almost heartless to emphasize that the individual players at the end of the equation are, 9 times out of 10, completely fungible. So for every 53-man roster, you’ve got about a half dozen difference-makers, the rest are average and replaceable soldiers. So your key goal is to not only find difference-makers for your team, but allocate your resources to acquire and retain those players in the positions that are most critical to the success of your coaching scheme. So you find the best players that can make the biggest difference, regardless of roster holes. This is utterly antithetical to using team need as a tool in prioritizing your draft and free agent acquisitions. This is the devil known as Positional-Value. It’s a necessary evil that inflates the importance of one talent pool above another and lays waste to mock-drafter and painstakingly-crafted draft grades buy the well-intentioned tape-watchers of our world.

This function of prioritizing causes fans and scouts endless heartburn as they watch players they feel can fill current holes passed-over for projects at other positions. Particularly when they hear John Schneider on the radio recently, admitting that need does push guys up their draft board. OK, but if team need is ignored by John until much later in free agency and the Draft, what the hell does he mean when he says that??? It’s a fundamental shift in defining what need is. When John says “need”, he is referring to the demands of the scheme which require added emphasis on position groups critical to success on the field. Naturally, he doesn’t want to tell you anything about his motivation or what they might suggest in predicting their personnel moves, but we can distill from that exactly what “need” means to John and Pete. It means needs of the scheme-dependent positions, not needs across all position. You see this reflected in the terms John and Pete use in speaking about adding and taking care of their “core guys.” But if this is accurate, it must also explain past moves, and beyond that, be predictive of future ones as well.

*Fun fact: Best Player Available is code for, “Piss off! I’m not telling you anything about my draft strategy!” BPA and team need inferences are simple smokescreens generally accepted among fans and pundits because they are easy to understand and tell you absolutely nothing about what is really going on. Like telling your 5 year-old that babies come from a stork, it’s just a pat on the head and a warm glass of milk at bedtime for the oblivious. Fans deserve better!

Moving down through the tiers of talent evaluation and acquisition, it’s helpful to start plotting out what the scheme will demand of the roster in critical positions, then map out how much you want to spend on each one. There are many moving parts and the cap stretches over a series of years. Manipulating the salary cap is like a high-stakes game of gin rummy where the goal is to use your cards in combination all at the right time, marrying the cards in your hand to the cards on the table, leaving you with nothing left in your hand. But consider trying to do that while the King and the Jack decide they’d rather be paid like Aces, and the Queen and the 10 are considering retirement. Still want to be a NFL GM? Riiiiight…

So how do you get down to what’s really important? You rely on self-scouting as much as college scouting, but also plan contingencies that keep you young, cheap, and up-n-coming.

This is exactly why the offseason is so much fun. You get to see what the priorities really are in how teams spend their money. John and Pete approached free agency this year with the attitude of “OL problem? What OL problem? Letting Duane Brown walk despite much hand-wringing and adding two rookie OTs in the Draft to bookend this line for a minimum of 4 years. The timing of these decisions are huge validation that OL investment was essentially wasted on Russell Wilson’s limited command of the designed offense. No OL was going to protect him for 8 seconds while he ran around making up his mind, or from himself. Kudos to Pete and John for recognizing early-on that any overly cap heavy investment in OL for Russ was a wasted investment. That money was instead used on downfield weapons for Russ and a defense to keep games close enough for him to be competitive in the 4th quarter where he chose to apply himself.

The example of Seahawks offensive line strategy illustrates a couple John Schneider strengths perfectly. A superior grasp of exactly what is, and what is not, truly required for scheme success, as well as such expertly focused self-scouting. Another is the rise opf Geno Smith. By any measure, Geno is gifted and experienced enough to get this shot, and we’re sitting on the next giant John Schneider-Pete Carroll success story that they’ll claim they saw coming all along. This is what is known as a “Hedge.” It’s just one of the functions by which you make a perceived need, not a need. And the best teams hedge their most important positions as often as possible. It now makes the high-end picks and trade game flexible as they can let the Draft come to them once again. Reload vs Rebuild. John has been mastering this in Seattle for a decade.

*Quick note on the perception of the Seahawks as a Defense First team: John Schneider & Pete Carroll have used early round Draft resources on selecting or acquiring (trade) offensive skill players to surround Russell Wilson nearly 40% of the time! In 2019, offensive cap spending outpaced defensive spending for the 1st time and they continue to be an offensive cap-heavy roster with TDL, DK and a looming extension for Geno Smith. Who’s defensive? You could never tell by the way they spend their money and use draft capital, that’s for sure!

But what does all this mean for the draft!? It means there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. It means the Seahawks have a war room filled with sound decision-makers ready to attack the draft proactively because they know what is mission-critical and what is not. 2023 differs from past seasons only in that John Schneider has more draft resources than usual. Through wise planning and good calls in free agency periods they’ll once again look to a future where they’ll bring the maximum amount of leverage to their position.

The final element where Free Agency and the Draft over-lap is in the Compensatory Pick formula. So when a high-profile player makes his money grab on the open market, you can get a player to replace him in the form of an additional future draft pick. GMs essentially trade top-of-the-market contracts and little club control, for volume in the draft, added service years and cheap club control of player contracts. It’s the money-laundering of the NFL. As if staying youngry and inexpensive weren’t reward enough, good GM’s like John Schneider & Bill Belichick play the Comp Pick game to maximum effect. There’s a reason you see these names associated with the majority of Lombardi Trophies presented over the past number of years. They are the current masters of the salary cap universe. Youth, volume, club control, cost control, service time, risk management. These are the lexicon of NFL success.

So the draft is essentially where you stay young and cheap, maximizing club control of player contracts over the long term at key positions. Free agency is where you plug short-term holes by paying market values over the near-term that lack the essential element of club control. While it’s possible to find value in free agency, you can think of it as shopping Whole Foods versus Costco. With a limited grocery budget, you can impress your friends with a nice dinner this weekend, but by the end of the month you’ll be eating Top Ramen and pizza crusts again.

My goal was to bring greater awareness for and clearly define the goals, strategies and tactics used by the most successful GMs in the NFL when building their rosters. Positional values, contract slotting, free agency and the draft are tools they use to accomplish this. They are not separate things. These are pieces to a larger puzzle and they can only be successful in coordination and in relation to one another. Addressing what we generally perceive to be team needs is a multi-faceted, multi-year project and there is no savior on the way that could effectively plug every hole in a roster. At best, roster building is a craps shoot and successful GMs hedge, stall and haggle at every opportunity to keep the whole thing affordable. They do this with limited resources, knowing there is no such thing as loyalty or home town discounts, and their fellow franchises lining-up to cut their throats at every turn. It’s a brutal marketplace for a brutal sport and it demands fresh blood constantly.

For more info, feedback and live-blogging of the 2023 NFL Draft draft, follow me on Twitter at @will_nflseattle