It’s safe to say that championships are won in the war room. The war room is a draft reference, but that’s where a large percentage of trades or worked out. Thinking about the 2022 Seattle Seahawks, trades are a good way to map out how we got here. I thought I’d go in mostly reverse chronological order.
The Russell Wilson trade is already being bantered about as one of the biggest trades in NFL history. CBS Sports ranked it number three on their top-five list of NFL trades all time. Seahawks fans will be happy to know that the 2010 trade that brought Marshawn Lynch from the Buffalo Bills also made the list.
Who comes out on top in the Seattle-Denver deal is won’t even be answered in the season-opening confrontation, but it the next chapter of the conversation. If you’re a Broncos person you’re pleased to have a franchise quarterback. If you like the Seahawks you were happy to get some draft picks. The team garnered five draft choices, including two first- and one second-round pick — not an insignificant fact for a team that had only three selections in 2021.
Seattle also received three Broncos players in the deal —quarterback Drew Lock, tight end Noah Fant and D-lineman Shelby Harris. Acquiring Fant is like acquiring another first-round pick. The 20th selection in the 2019 Draft, he has caught more than 60 passes in each of the past two seasons. He’s big news for a franchise whose all-time roster includes only one Pro Bowl tight end.
And then there’s Lock, who, while in competition with Geno Smith for the starting job, is a talent that Coach Pete Carroll says would have been the top QB in the draft if he had come out this year.
With the number nine pick in the 2022 Draft, Seattle selected the tackle Charles Cross, who was the team’s first top-ten selection since 2010. That made up for some of the embarrassment for having surrendered the tenth pick of the draft to the New York Jets in the 2020 Jamal Adams trade. Nothing like atoning for a lost pick with one slot ahead.
That trade didn’t look so bad when the first first-round in the deal proved to be outside of the top 20 in 2021, though the Jets traded up to 14th, but that had nothing to do with the Seahawks. You would have to have been a cynic to foresee a seven-win season for Seattle in 2021.
What About the Pass Rush
Getting back to Wilson, he signed his third and final deal with the Seahawks in 2019, making him the highest[-paid NFL player at the time. That made it hard for Seattle to retain edge-rusher Frank Clark, who they designated as their franchise player. Rather than re-signing Clark they traded him to the Kansas City Chiefs and the Seahawks have been trying to fix their pass rush ever since.
In the Clark deal Seattle acquired a first-round pick that year and a second-rounder for 2020 while the Chiefs moved up in the third round of 2019 in an exchange of picks. With the first-round the Seahawks addressed the pass rush with the selection of L.J. Collier. While still with the team today, Collier was mostly absent as a rookie, recording three tackles while battling injuries.
Seattle addressed problems in the secondary when they acquired safety Quandre Diggs in midseason deal in 2019. He came cheaply from Detroit as the Lions moved up from a seventh-round pick to a fifth in the 2020 Draft. That’s all it cost for the Seahawks to obtain a player who has had two Pro Bowl seasons since joining the team, playing the free-safety position once occupied by Earl Thomas
Seattle’s greatest deal as it pertains to the current roster was most likely trading up in the second round to draft wide receiver D.K. Metcalf, also in 2019. It was a strange year for rookie receivers. No wideout was taken in the top 20 and Metcalf was the last of seven receivers to go in the second round. Still, six receivers from that draft have already made the Pro Bowl.
Trading Up for Receiver is a Thing
Metcalf has formed a tandem with Tyler Lockett, who, himself was selected in a trade-up situation. The Seahawks dealt fourth, fifth- and six-rounders in addition to the third-round selection they were trading from to land Lockett early in that round.
It’s not often that a team moves up in the draft to select a specialist, but the Seahawks did that in 2018 when they sent Denver a seventh-round choice to move up in the fifth round. With the trade they were able to take punter Michael Dickson, who made the Pro Bowl as a rookie. He showed his savvy in a win at Detroit that year when he ran a fake punt out of the end zone for a first down. The fake punt hadn’t been called. Dickson was actually supposed to take an intentional safety but saw an opportunity.