Indictment of a draft class, not a draftee
Is this the "enshittification" of the NFL draft?
You’ve probably heard the term “enshittification” sometime in the past few years, but the best summary I could find of its meaning is here:
“the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation”
Did the football talent pipeline finally “enshittify” the NFL Draft by exploiting the college football market with the transfer portal and NIL opportunities?
Both systems are reasonable and fair (one gives players the freedom to go where they want whenever they want and the other gives players a piece of the pie to a billion dollar industry that they provide the content for) but just because something is right doesn’t mean that it has positive consequences.
Since Thursday night, a lot of people have said that the Seattle Seahawks got a really good running back prospect when they drafted Jadarian Price with the 32nd overall pick. None of them —even the most excited — have said that Price is as good as the typical running back who is drafted around the 32nd pick.
So if Price is a “third round talent” with a “first round outcome” that tells us one of two things could be true:
The Seahawks reached
The draft lost an entire round’s worth of talented prospects
I’ve heard people say that Seattle “reached” but not with the typical vigor and disgust that has come with past top-50 running back picks. The general sentiment has been that “Yeah the Seahawks reached on Price, but what else can you do? The third running back is so much worse.”
Price at 32nd — and to a degree Fernando Mendoza at 1 — tells me that the 2026 NFL Draft was indeed ENSHITTIFIED. The Rams took “Christian Ponder” at 13. The Cardinals took a running back at 3. Teams were trading up with fourth and fifth round picks. Another year’s “pick 25” became this year’s “pick 6*”.
*a term ty simpson might want to get familiar with
It’s understandable to feel underwhelmed by the Seahawks drafting a running back who most people think is a worse prospect than Kenneth Walker III was as the 41st pick in 2022, but also justifiable to say that it’s not just Seattle’s problem:
Hoping for a better prospect is the battle, but hoping to get a better draft class next year is the war.
Here’s what people are saying about Jadarian Price, his fit with the Seahawks, and some very positive film breakdowns of tape at Notre Dame that I managed to find last night. But I’m also going to cover the concerns that people have with the pick, why some analysts had a third to fifth (yes, fifth) round grade on him, and how the 2026 draft class is not a SEA problem it’s a WE problem.