Do's and Don'ts of NFL draft predictions

How to predict what the Seahawks will and won't do in the NFL Draft: Seaside Joe 1844

Last year, I predicted that the Seattle Seahawks would draft Devon Witherspoon even though there were at least six prospects who had higher odds of being their pick, but if I mention this too many times people will start to think that I believe that I actually knew what Pete Carroll and John Schneider were going to do with the fifth overall pick. I didn’t know anything! I got lucky, most people got unlucky, and as far as we know Seattle would have picked any player who went in the top-4 (Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, Will Anderson, Anthony Richardson) if any of those prospects had dropped to them.

I picked Witherspoon because he was a) a prospect who I thought would be available at pick 5 and b) the one I would feel most comfortable being wrong about if the Seahawks chose somebody I didn’t predict, which is usually what they do on draft night.

Two years ago, my first mock pick after the Russell Wilson trade was Charles Cross. I felt he would be available and I expect Seattle to want to use this opportunity to get a left tackle. Then days later, I wrote him off and my final pick was defensive tackle Jordan Davis.

“Why doesn’t Seaside Joe ever bring up his misses?!” I do. I did!

It is a blessing and a blessing to pick fifth overall the year after you make the playoffs. Denver’s gift that became pick 5 in the 2023 draft made it that much easier to predict who the Seahawks would choose and what they would do because we didn’t have to ask if they would choose Lukas Van Ness (who went 13th) or Quentin Johnston (who went 21st), we only needed to consider these questions:

Would they trade up? Once the Panthers traded up with the Bears, this appeared to be 100% off the table.

Would they trade down? Seattle doesn’t have enough rare top-5 draft talents on the roster to seriously consider this for anything less than an overpay and because the QBs went 1, 2, 4, it made it unlikely teams would want to move up after that. The only team that did move up was the Cardinals, a division rival.

Would they pick a QB? I was convinced that the QBs would be off the board by five and didn’t think Will Levis was worth an early selection, this really helped narrow down the choices considerably.

After ruling out those possibilities, I just had to ask would they pick Witherspoon, Jalen Carter, or Tyree Wilson? They could have considered Bijan Robinson too, but it didn’t seem like you’d do that with the chance to get a prospect who was just as exciting at a different position. I didn’t believe that Wilson was worth a top-10 pick, so he’s out.

Then I just guessed that the team wouldn’t risk taking Carter when they could have a prospect who was just as talented and who execs knew without a shadow of doubt desperately wants to keep getting better at football.

I’m not as impressed with predicting Devon Witherspoon as you might think because I do feel he was the most obvious choice. What I think is happening is that a lot of people have been overly obsessed with what the Internet says and thinks, which leads to a blurrier sense of reality and a compulsion to believe everything they read, then repeat it so people know...

Go against the majority narratives and be ridiculed for doing so. So I think choosing Witherspoon or making almost any prediction these days, it’s basically like the proverb, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

With that sort of groupthink being able to control the prevailing “opinions” of the NFL on today’s Internet, in my view it makes it immeasurably easier to look better by comparison to that because not only can you be right about the same things they are when the answers are obvious (The Bears will trade Justin Fields and draft Caleb Williams), you can also divert from popular narratives and shoot a higher percentage shot on things they are wrong about (The Bears will get a first or second round pick for Fields).

What I know about the Seaside Joe community is that you came to this website and newsletter because you are already an independent thinker. Just the act of subscribing to a newsletter for information is already by definition left of mainstream thinking.

That is already a huge advantage for Seaside Joe and the Seaside Joe community in the prediction game and takes arena, not only because we question and challenge those “prevailing ideas”, but due to the fact that there is currently no movement or intention for those other sites to improve their predictions or audit their methods when they go wrong:

If all 32 teams in the NFL don’t do what “The Internet” had predicted they or at least one franchise would do, to “The Internet” that means that all 32 teams in the NFL are wrong. Because it couldn’t be that “The Internet” was wrong.

Here at Seaside Joe, we will evaluate where mistakes happened (Jordan Davis) and why we sometimes get lucky (Devon Witherspoon) in an attempt to do better next time.

Unfortunately, the Seahawks are now picking 11 spots later than they did in 2023 and the odds of accurately predicting Seattle’s first round selection in 2024 are not twice as hard or three times as hard…It’s exponentially more difficult to project who John Schneider will want&be able to select in about a month. I’m not choosing between three players, I might be choosing between 15 or 20 or more.

We’ll need to set some rules of draft predictions before we begin, the Do’s and Don’ts that have helped me weed through the constant noise of The Internet to at least be a little more accurate than those websites usually are these days.

(Re: the headline, I had to look up the recommended grammar rules for this and while The New York Times uses Dos and Don’ts, AP Stylebook uses Do’s and Don’ts, while barely anyone uses Do’s and Don’t’s. I’m sure many of you had questions about that, so I’m sharing what happened behind the curtain.)

Before I even write about which 2024 NFL Draft prospects could be on the Seahawks radar, I need to write about THE RADAR. You don’t win Battleship by obsessing over the ships; you win Battleship by reading the person who is placing them in their positions.

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These are the Do’s and Don’ts that I am going to start with before I predict what the Seahawks will do on April 25th: