3 surprises that could happen at Seahawks training camp

Should Walter Jones have won MVP in 2005? Seaside Joe 1603

Is Walter Jones proof that writers who vote on NFL awards don’t really know what they’re watching and just “follow the ball”? I’ll explain.

Read next: The logistics of a Chris Jones trade—should Seahawks do it?

In 2005, Shaun Alexander became the first and still only Seahawks player to win the MVP award, finishing with 19 votes and beating out Peyton Manning (13 votes), Tom Brady (10), Tiki Barber (6), and Carson Palmer (2). Alexander also won Offensive Player of the Year after rushing for 1,880 yards and 27 touchdowns, beating out the same four players.

But should Walter Jones have been the 2005 MVP instead?

Pop quiz hotshot: How many years did Walter Jones holdout of training camp and not show up until the start of the regular season?

Personally, I was advocating for quarterback Matt Hasselbeck in 2005 because like most people I was crediting a lot of Alexander’s success to the offensive line and Hasselbeck played so well on the road that year. For a team that we knew was going to be impossible to beat at home (10-0, including playoffs), Hasselbeck rebounded from two interceptions at Jacksonville in Week 1 to throw nine touchdowns and no interceptions over the next seven away games.

Now I consider “young me” to be more of a naive fanboy for backing Hasselbeck and wonder why there’s such a disparity between how the NFL pays left tackles and how stupendously impossible it is for left tackles to get any awards recognition. It simply has to be that NFL writers don’t know how to value anything other than players who touch the football.

Not only because they’re unsure what to think of the left tackles that they cover (be it Jones or Orlando Pace or Jonathan Ogden of that era), but also because they don’t intensely watch any film of other left tackles in the league. Everybody has a strong opinion on every quarterback in the league—and the backups—but almost nobody knows what to say about left tackle these days except…

“Trent Williams is so great and Laremy Tunsil is so great” and feverishly double-checking the most recent All-Pro teams as I’m doing right now.

Seahawks training camp starts in: 3 days!!!

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But aside from being told who to respect and who not to respect, how else do most writers and fans judge offensive linemen and specifically left tackles? Money is one way to do it.

As of 2023, there are now three left tackles making at least $23 million per season (Tunsil, Williams, David Bakhtiari) and another nine who make between $15-$19 million per season. At prices like that, the top of the left tackle market is only superceded by the top of the quarterback, receiver, interior defensive tackle, and edge rusher market.

Top-paid left tackles make more than all the offensive line positions (although no position has gotten more of a raise in the last 10 years than right tackles), cornerbacks, linebackers, and of course safeties, running backs, and tight ends.

But we see cornerbacks and safeties win major awards (Stephon Gilmore won DPOY in 2019, Ed Reed won in 2004), we see running backs get MVP and OPOY consideration (and Ken Walker finished second in OROY), we know of linebackers (Luke Kuechly) winning awards, and every other position seems to have some chance at writers going, “Ah yes, he’s the best of all the guys on that side of the ball this year!”

They just can’t seem to do it with left tackles despite DECADES of people putting left tackles in their “top-three most important positions” rankings.

Hall of Fame? Sure. To reward a career of All-Pro and Pro Bowl accolades that writers handed out because they had to, that’s not so difficult. But even getting consideration for something like Offensive Rookie of the Year (in 2021, Rashawn Slater of the Chargers was an All-Pro and Pro Bowler who received a single OROY vote) is basically impossible too.

I can think of a team’s entire season falling apart because of a left tackle injury (the Cowboys come to mind with several Tyron Smith IR trips) and we could argue that as bad as it was for the Seahawks to give Steve Hutchinson the transition tag in 2006 and to extend Alexander past his prime that same year, nothing crumbled Seattle’s championship window like Jones fading into retirement during his final couple of seasons.

I don’t think Abraham Lucas should have won Offensive Rookie of the Year in 2022—or even received a vote actually—but I also know that he could have played like Lane Johnson and had the same chance of winning. The only reason I can think of for that…it’s not because of value, it’s because a writer in Seattle has no problem telling you how good Garrett Wilson is and a writer in New York has no problem telling you how good Ken Walker III is and a writer in Jacksonville can go on for hours about Kenny Pickett but seemingly nobody knows how to talk about Charles Cross and Abe Lucas unless offensive line play is literally the one thing you follow.

And then nobody will listen to you.

The Seahawks report to training camp on Tuesday, let’s jump into three potential surprises we might see unfold between then and the end of training camp.

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Olu Oluwatimi wins starting center position

This article was actually inspired by another video I watched praising Olu Oluwatimi as “the best center prospect in the draft” and a fifth round steal for the Seahawks. A channel that is called “Sports Talk Extra” (I don’t know why so many of these nice folks don’t choose better names because these generic ones all blend together) is Lions-based but still high on Oluwatimi. That’s partly attributed to his play at Michigan, I’m sure. I’ll still take all the reasons for center optimism I can get.

Maybe it is even more intriguing that this is a Lions channel because it means that they know Evan Brown as well as anyone and are still seemingly backing Oluwatimi as Seattle’s center.

I have been adament since the draft that I expect Brown to be the Seahawks center in Week 1, that’s definitely how Pete Carroll talks about Evan Brown, and I still expect him to be the center. That’s why Oluwatimi winning the job would be a “surprise” to me, as suggested in the prompt, but I still think it could happen.

The number of centers who win starting jobs as rookies is roughly 1-2 per season. In 2022, Tyler Linderbaum, a first round pick, was the only center to start at least half of the season. In 2021, it was only Creed Humphrey (a second round pick but considered by many as the best center in the class) and Kendrick Green (who was benched and didn’t play at all in 2022). In 2020, the only one was Lloyd Cushenberry, a third round pick of the Broncos who has also struggled and is fighting for a job by now.

That’s another element to this position battle which is that even if a rookie wins a starting job, it doesn’t necessarily make that player the long-term answer or an immediate one. Green, Cushenberry, Mason Cole, Billy Price, Nick Martin…many of the rookie centers who have been named starters in the last six years have become journeyman backups. And few of the rookie starting centers were picked on day three.

It’s only once a decade that someone like Jason Kelce, a sixth round pick in 2011, comes along. Kelce’s fall in the draft was considered to be because of his lack of size (280 lbs) but he was the fastest offensive linemen at the combine…in part because of his diminuitive size for an offensive lineman. Oluwatimi is nothing like Jason Kelce.

That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be a steal too, it just means that he’d have to go about proving teams wrong for different reasons than Kelce.

Oluwatimi isn’t near the athlete of the NFL’s top centers, he is not expected to be able to go toe-to-toe against the league’s best nose tackles (a position that has only gotten more talented in the last decade), but he was the best player on the country’s best offensive line and he’s been impressing coaches and winning battles since he arrived as a transfer at Virginia in 2018.

In Seattle, Oluwatimi has an advantage in that he doesn’t have to be better than Kelce. He only needs to be better than a career utility backup for the Lions and Joey Hunt, one of Pete’s picks back in 2016 who has maybe spent more weeks on the practice squad than as a starter. It could happen and then we’ll take from there on rating how good it was that it happened.

In last week’s post about 4 training camp storylines, a poll-leading 35% of you voted that Oluwatimi would win the job at center, but then another 21% voted that both rookies would start in Week 1. So actually 56% of you voted that Oluwatimi would beat out Brown and Hunt to be the center.

Other poll winners from last week: Mario Edwards will play more snaps than Mike Morris, 50% of you voted that you can be patient with Jamal Adams (32% voted to “move on” with the rest saying they’re not paying attention), and 41% voted that Drew Lock will be the Seahawks starter some day.

Seahawks find their next “Poona Ford UDFA” on defensive line

The Seahawks officially lost Poona Ford this year, five seasons after signing him as an undrafted free agent out of Texas who most people kind of expected would be much better than many of the players who were drafted. Ford was arguably the highest-profile UDFA in the league that year and he showed up to win a job as a rookie and eventually get a contract extension, but Seattle officially decided they needed more size at nose tackle in 2023 and parted ways.

Could now be the time that the Saehawks find their next “Poona Ford”, whether that’s on the defensive line or not?

The best UDFA on the roster last season was Joey Blount and I’m not sure how many people know of him or how many serious contenders for his spot on the 53-man roster there will be this camp. More than zero, for sure. Before that, it was Jake Curhan. I wouldn’t say there was a true first-year UDFA rookie from 2019 or 2020 who stood out. So Poona was really the last one (though yes, Bryan Mone, Myles Adams, and Penny Hart would be examples of UDFAs, they just didn’t have an impact or in some cases make the roster as rookies).

The Seahawks have 13 UDFA rookies on defense and eight on offense.

Read next: The logistics of a Chris Jones trade—should Seahawks do it?

Safety/special teams specialist Jonathan Sutherland stood out so much at OTAs that I wrote an Origin Story about him. But even if he makes the roster, which is still a long shot, he may not have more of a role than Blount did. Defensive end M.J. Anderson got the biggest signing bonus to pick the Seahawks over other teams. Receiver John Hall got a sizeable bonus too. Defensive tackle Jonah Tavai has the clearest path to something Seattle needs right now. Receivers Jake Bobo and Matt Landers, guard Kendall Randolph, defensive back Arquon Bush…the list could go on until the end, but to really know who is standing out in training camp we have to wait and see what happens in practice.

I won’t be surprised if we’re surprised.

DB forces his way into key role

We know that Riq Woolen is awesome, although he’s recovering from “minor” knee surgery. We know that Devon Witherspoon is awesome, but he’s a rookie and one who might need some time to learn how to be less handsy than he was in college. We know that Pete Carroll cited Mike Jackson as the standout of OTAs, we just don’t know how he will do after one total season as an NFL starter. We know that Jamal Adams could technically be good, we just don’t know when he’s ever going to play again. If he’s ever going to play again.

It’s the depth beyond those guys and around Quandre Diggs that could be so interesting between day one and the final day of training camp.

The fourth cornerback and the third safety just don’t tend to get many snaps barring injuries, and if Seattle is putting a sixth defensive back on the field we might assume that it is going to be Julian Love. It’s fine to be a huge fan of Coby Bryant or Tre Brown or rookie Jerrick Reed, it’s just a matter of how to make the math work if you want any of those guys to see the field AND to play Riq, Witherspoon, Jackson, Diggs, Adams, and Love also. The math doesn’t work.

So say that Adams is out for a month and Love is elevated to SS1, and Witherspoon moves from outside to inside when the Seahawks go to nickel with Jackson on the outside…there still shouldn’t be many snaps for someone like Bryant or Brown, right? Maybe I’m not right, let me know in the comments:

As I noted recently, Justin Coleman was CB4 last season and he got less than 100 snaps all season long. Seattle played Coby Bryant because they didn’t have Devon Witherspoon yet. One of the 2022 offseason storylines was playing Bryant in the nickel and it was an experiment that many say failed, eventually leading to using a top-five pick on a cornerback—and one of the top offseason storylines is again experimenting with a rookie at nickel.

Brown has now played 0 snaps, 255 snaps, and 21 snaps through three seasons. He’s played in 11 of a possible 50 games. But if a defensive back proves good enough to help the defense this season, Pete’s going to play him, and there is probably more competition and depth in the secondary than anywhere else on the roster.

Even giving too much credit to Adams and assuming he’s going to be on the team soon, the Seahawks have a very solid first-six options in the secondary. But I could see a situation playing out where one of Bryant, Brown, Reed, or maybe a big surprise—Artie Burns, Blount, Isaiah Dunn, one of the UDFAs—proves too good to hold back.

In 2022, the Seahawks were so thin in the secondary that Mike Jackson and Tariq Woolen made their first career starts in Week 1, Coleman and Coby were filling in the third spot, and Josh Jones replaced Adams. This camp seems to be the opposite of that camp, and at least one player who seems like he should be starting will probably have to settle for waiting his turn.

Answer: Walter Jones held out in 2002, 2003, and 2004 because of the franchise tag. He signed a seven-year, $52.5 million contract in 2005.

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