Why the Seahawks would draft Ty Simpson (and why they won't)
Will John Schneider ever start drafting quarterbacks like he's back with the Packers?
We’re all doing it recently. You, me, and every Seahawks fan we know, we’re doing it and we can’t avoid it. We’re talking about who the Seahawks could draft in two weeks.
That’s what we all share in common, but here’s what only some of us have in common: I’m nonplussed.
This is the desirable consequence of going deep in the playoffs, winning a Super Bowl, the fans don’t get to fantasize a future with any of the best prospects. Even picking 16th or 18th like Seattle did the past two years, there’s a real chance to get someone special. Byron Murphy and Grey Zabel entered the league ranked 1st or 2nd at their position groups.
To get the top-ranked player at his position at pick 32, the Seahawks would have to start debating the merits of securing the best longsnapper in the class.
I exaggerate.
And there are even “needs” that could be addressed at pick 32, like running back (with the number two player in the class, Jadarian Price, expected to go on day two), or guard (Emmanuel Pregnon is ranked second at iOL but only 40th overall on the consensus big board), or defensive tackle.
But I seriously couldn’t be anymore nonplussed with the options if I was a broken calculator.
—The second running back drafted in 2023 was Jahmyr Gibbs, a dynamic, field-tilting prospect who went 12th overall.
—The second running back drafted in 2024 was Trey Benson, an early third round pick who missed 13 games last year.
RB2
Seahawks fans are waiting for that moment when the media starts to talk about Price as a sleeper who could be as good, or better, than Kenneth Walker III. It isn’t going to happen. Even if Price does prove in the future to be a steal, nobody’s putting their neck out for him at 32.
G2
Pregnon, as pointed out by John Gilbert today, is basically the same age as Charles Cross. Do you want Seattle to use a first rounder on a 25-year-old prospect who pulled out of the draft last year because he wasn’t getting a good grade as a 24-year-old?
DT1
Clemson’s Peter Woods, the consensus first or second-ranked defensive tackle, is on a trajectory like this since last year:
All roads lead us back to the same place, which is the Seahawks drafting a player who is going to be ranked 40th-60th on some big boards whether that’s an edge rusher (think R Mason Thomas, Gabe Jacas, Malachi Lawrence, Zion Young) or a cornerback (Brandon Cisse, Colton Hood, Chris Johnson), or Seattle trading down and getting an even worse-graded prospect with their first pick.
And any of those outcomes could still work out great!
T.J. Watt, Creed Humphrey, and Cooper DeJean are just three recent draft picks that came to mind for being drafted around the end of the first to end of the second round who overcame the skepticism.
It is still more likely that the 32nd overall picked cornerback will be Deandre Baker or Noah Igbinoghene than DeJean or Trent McDuffie. A player like Joey Porter Jr. did have a breakout season in 2025, but took three years to get there and it’s not clear yet if this production is repeatable.
Edge rushers like Boye Mafe and Derick Hall are local examples of above-average players at the position drafted in the range of Seattle’s first pick.
Fans should be more excited for the actual Derick Hall than a Hall clone who would be three years younger and signed for 3-4 more seasons than Hall.
This is not how the draft is designed to work. The replacement should be more valuable and intriguing than the player he’s pushing out.
Instead, it’s the 25-year-old Hall who appears to have a better chance of taking over for Uchenna Nwosu than a first round rookie. And Hall only had 2 sacks in the 16 games he played last season prior to the Super Bowl.
This is why I think Seahawks fans could understandably be more excited with how the 32nd pick could be used as trade bait — whether that’s for Dexter Lawrence or to move down or perhaps in the most ideal world to get a first round pick in 2027 — than to draft a cornerback, running back, edge rusher, or guard.
What’s your preference? Join the community and stop lurking!
Which brings me to Ty Simpson
First of all, Ty Simpson is a quarterback from Alabama (so he sat behind Jalen Milroe for two years) and he’s the second-ranked quarterback in the class. If you don’t follow the draft at all, you may not have known that because there’s no expectation that Seattle would be looking at quarterbacks since they have three right now.
Second of all, this is only a thought experiment.
“Why do a thought experiment for a quarterback if it’s not going to happen?”
Because we’ve all heard the theory that teams should draft a quarterback every year or so.
Former Lions GM Bob Quinn — who did not have much success in Detroit but came up in a Patriots organization that drafted players like Matt Cassel and Jimmy Garoppolo so that they could be traded — said that teams should draft a quarterback “every year or every other year”:
"I think it's really good football business to acquire a young quarterback every year or every other year," Quinn said, via the Detroit Free Press. "There's such a value in the position and nowadays in college football there's a lot of spread offenses, which means it's a lot different than pro football. So it takes these young quarterbacks time to develop. So if you can add a young quarterback every year or every other year to your roster, it's good football business in my mind. So you have time to develop them, either on the practice squad or as a backup, before eventually them having to play in a game."
The Patriots drafted Tom Brady in 2000 when they had Drew Bledsoe and they drafted three quarterbacks during their first three-Super Bowl run (Davey, Kingsbury, Cassel) and nobody has ever said that it “ruined their dynasty”.
When Brady became a perennial MVP candidate starting in 2007, New England drafted FOUR day two quarterbacks from 2008-2016 (O’Connell, Mallett, Garoppolo, Brissett) and nobody refers back to that era as a mistake. In fact, the Patriots won three more Super Bowls.
In fact, Brissett is a starter today, Garoppolo was one snap away from replacing Matthew Stafford last season, and 2019 fourth round pick Jarrett Stidham started the AFC Championship game. O’Connell is a head coach and Kingsbury is the assistant head coach of the Rams.
At worst, the Patriots were using mid-round picks on players who understood football better than anyone else in the class. At best, they were drafting borderline NFL starters who they could trade for more draft picks.
This is something that John Schneider could relate to from his time working under former Packers GM Ted Thompson:
Over Thompson’s first four drafts as GM, the Packers drafted four quarterbacks:
Aaron Rodgers
Ingle Martin
Brian Brohm
Matt Flynn
At best, he drafted a Hall of Famer. At second best, Matt Flynn was a really good backup for a little while.
But nowhere in the NFL could you find a franchise that cares less about the quarterback position than the Seattle Seahawks.
Is there a chance that Milroe was not the outlier — the third quarterback that Schneider has ever drafted — but the start of a new trend?
Free from Pete Carroll’s grip after 14 years of a partnership, Schneider’s decision to draft Milroe 92nd overall and “see what happens” is exactly what teams like the Patriots and Packers have done for years. The only difference is that until the Seahawks do something like that again, Milroe is not part of a pattern; he’s the representation of Schneider’s trust in Seattle’s coaching staff to develop him into a quarterback fit for the NFL.
But if it happens again in 2026 or 2027, now we can start seeing Schneider as a GM who believes it’s better to scratch a $50 lottery ticket than a $1 lottery ticket.
Worse odds, better return.
Why the Seahawks would draft Ty Simpson
Aside from Dan Orlovsky and his agency at CAA that also represents Simpson, nobody would compare drafting Simpson to drafting Rodgers.
Rodgers being expected to go 1st or 2nd overall to going 24th was and is one of the biggest draft stories in NFL history. Simpson isn’t even a regular in first round mock drafts and by the time we get to the draft he could be a consensus day two pick.
So bringing up Simpson shouldn’t be confused with a plea for Seattle to go get him because he’s being undervalued. Simpson isn’t Rodgers or Lamar Jackson, not as a prospect.
Instead, the Seahawks would draft Simpson because:
A) He’s a quarterback (top value position)
B) He’s the number two quarterback in the class, bar none
C) Schneider could gain leverage in a Sam Darnold negotiation
D) Schneider is nonplussed with the other options at 32
E) The Seahawks see space between Drew Lock and Milroe
By now you were probably wondering how the Seahawks could draft a quarterback when they already have three, which is of course why Seattle would NOT draft Ty Simpson with their first pick.
But the Seahawks have 5 rock solid receivers on the roster too and this hasn’t stopped most people from pondering a receiver at 32.
Lock could already be talking to Schneider like, “Hey, if a team calls in August or September asking for my services because their starter went down, please trade me.”
Nobody reading this newsletter and nobody outside of the organization has any idea how far Milroe has come in his development since the last draft. He could be closer to pushing Lock out of his job than anybody realizes or the team could be questioning if he’ll ever be more than a gadget. All we know for certain is that the Seahawks didn’t put Milroe on the active gameday roster after Week 5.
Seattle’s quarterback depth is best described as “relatively comfortable”, but almost every team has a backup like Lock and a developmental project like Milroe.
What teams really want is not a backup who could start, but instead a quarterback who should start.
The same issue that makes Simpson “too risky” to draft in the first round, which is that he only started 15 games in college, is also what makes him the ideal quarterback prospect to go somewhere between picks 20-50.
Lock is never going to be good enough for the Seahawks to believe that they don’t need Darnold.
Milroe could be that guy, but drafting another quarterback doubles Seattle’s chances of hitting the battleship, which means either one future starter … or two.
Take the 2016 Patriots, for example, a team that had 39-year-old Tom Brady, 25-year-old Jimmy Garoppolo, and 24-year-old Jacoby Brissett.
The Patriots won the 2016 Super Bowl
The Patriots traded Garoppolo in 2017 for a second round pick
The Patriots traded Brissett in 2017 for Philip Dorsett
There’s no other position in football that allows a team to trade a player for valuable resources because he played in two career games and was decent!
Yeah, if you’ve been following the Ty Simpson draft conversation this year and having the same reaction as me, it’s pretty annoying.
It’s frustrating for the media to bring up mid quarterback prospects on a daily basis simply because they’re “the quarterbacks of that draft”, and 2026 is an especially bad year for the position because the media can’t even pretend that there’s a QB3. Fernando Mendoza goes one and then nobody really knows where Simpson is going to go except to say that he’ll be next.
However, just because a quarterback should not go second overall doesn’t mean that every team shouldn’t be considering him in the second round. There’s an argument for drafting a quarterback almost every year and when you can get the second-best QB right after winning the Super Bowl, that’s maybe when a team has to consider it regardless of their current depth chart.
Because sometimes it’s better to be mad about who the Seahawks draft than not interested at all.