Is Maxx Crosby just Jimmy Graham 2.0?

Should Seahawks use first round pick to trade for a proven vet or continue to build the roster for the future and hope for the best?

Seattle may be home to the "huskies” but is their true size a double-X sell?

It wouldn’t be an NFL offseason without a few marquee names on the trade block, players who more often than not don’t get traded, but sometimes they do and this year fans of roughly 31 teams are hoping for Maxx Crosby. The Seahawks were rumored to be after Crosby in 2025, will John Schneider try again in 2026?

That’s one of the topics in today’s Super Joes Q&A.

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IdahoFred: Are we a dynasty yet?

Scott M: How have other dynasties crashed and how can we avoid the mistakes others have made?

Well, are fans ready to let go of some of their fan favorites? The easiest version of the Seahawks to beat next year is the one that is most like the version from last year.

I wrote a mini-rant that will be posted next week when I’m on a vacation (yes, Seaside Joe is actually going on a vacation…but the daily streak will continue!) about the importance of letting go of players before you know it’s time to part ways.

There’s this inclination by fans—and general managers/owners/coaches/players—to hold onto players until the wheels fall off. To overpay them. To set aside what’s logically best for the franchise in order to appease nostalgia or favoritism for the players who created so many great memories for us.

But I think the key to sustained success is obvious:

• Stay young

• Keep finding salary cap values

• Draft well = replace veterans

• Part with players the offseason before they decline, not the offseason after

Best move of the last 5 years? Trading Russell Wilson before the rest of the league realized he was toast.

Best move by the Seahawks last year? Trading Geno Smith and DK Metcalf while there was still a belief that they were valuable.

The perfect amount of time to keep Jaxon Smith-Njigba is roughly nine years. That’s another six years on the Seahawks, at least! Extending JSN is an easy decision.

The perfect amount of time to keep Rashid Shaheed? There is a chance, as much as fans don’t want to hear this right now, that Shaheed has already played his best career season with Seattle. Shaheed is already 28. He relies on speed. He never fit into the offense after the trade. I think the max timeline for Shaheed would be about two more years.

Re-signing Shaheed might be a foregone conclusion and despite what it sounds like, I’m all for it! But only if John Schneider sets a reasonable ceiling and doesn’t go above it just because he’s worried about losing the Seahawks return guy.

If the Seahawks gave Shaheed $10 million for one season, like the Rams just did with Tutu Atwell (and he caught six passes for that money), it’s $10 million not going to somebody else. So there has to be an acceptance that sometimes the best move for the team isn’t the best news for the player.

I’m just using Shaheed as an example. I’m pro-Shaheed. But it’s easier to make that comparison because he’s so clearly not as important as JSN and it’s important to make that distinction when it comes to building a roster with sustainable success: Decisions have to be robotic, not nostalgic.

As far as examples, I cited a few recently:

• The Rams overpaid players like Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald after winning the Super Bowl when they didn’t have to and it meant that L.A. was completely unable to compete in free agency in 2023 after the team went 5-12 and desperately needed help

• The Eagles overreacted to keeping some of their aging players between the 2023-2025 offseasons after reaching the Super Bowl in 2022 and 2024 and I think those mistakes are reflected in Philadelphia’s issues last season and moving into their current rebuild

Conversely, the Chiefs won a Super Bowl with Tyreek Hill and everyone said “WOW! TYREEK HILL IS THE BEST RECEIVER EVER! PATRICK MAHOMES WOULD NEVER BE THE SAME IF HE DIDN’T HAVE TYREEK HILL!”

Then the Chiefs traded Hill—a move that was surely met with a lot of vitriol by Chiefs fans—and won two more Super Bowls and Hill has been a very productive loser.

I’m not saying that the Seahawks should trade Tyreek Hill, but somewhere in there is a lesson about having a limit and not just falling for “oh that guy is so talented”. The Super Bowl is more like a symphony than a talent show.

zezinhom400: We have 32, 64 and 96 plus a 6th. Who are the guys you have clustering around those first two picks? Wanna double-watch them at the combine. Or, do you think John will trade them for ready-now players, like, would he give a 1 and a 3 for Maxx Crosby

DewHub: I think our biggest opportunity of the offseason is going to be upgrading our edge players. Will the 32nd pick give us an opportunity to do this or will JS go in a different direction?

sbb: Do the Seahawks have enough capital and cap space to land Maxx Crosby? Should they?

I’m asking myself if trading for Jimmy Graham in 2015 was bad process or just a bad result.

Because maybe somewhere in the idea to trade for Graham was a genius move by adding a tight end who had caught 26 touchdowns in the previous two seasons. Go back to 2014 and Marshawn Lynch (yes, Marshawn) led the Seahawks with FOUR touchdown catches and Seattle’s best tight end was Luke Willson.

Graham had the ability to instantly become a “WR1” for Russell Wilson and so if we’re not judging the result alone (Graham’s production dipped and Max Unger left a huge hole in the offensive line) then the process could have some brilliance that we’ve overlooked; especially given that the 2015 draft didn’t have any WR/TE talent at pick 31.

Okay, so with that thought established, is it bad process for the Seahawks to trade a first round pick for Maxx Crosby right after they won the Super Bowl without Maxx Crosby?

Or genius?

The team trading for Crosby assumes his $30 million salary in 2026 and then a $29 million salary in 2027 that will become fully-guaranteed soon.

That’s twice as much base salary as Seattle’s highest-paid player in 2026 and twice as much as any player in 2027 with the exception of Sam Darnold*.

*With Darnold’s $15 million roster bonus, it basically means that a team would value Crosby as being as valuable as the starting QB in 2026-2027.

Do I think that Crosby is as valuable as a starting QB? Can the Seahawks continue to build a championship roster while paying an edge rusher $30 million per year?

A 29-year-old edge rusher who just had knee surgery.

Yeah, it wasn’t considered “serious” knee surgery, but when is it never not serious when it’s a lower-body injury for a player who wants that much money and would cost a first round pick+more? This is when I start to get the feelings of “Oh this is gonna be one of those guys who is supposed to be ready for training camp and then we get to the middle of training camp and he hasn’t practiced yet.”

I don’t love that.

sbb asked if the Seahawks can do it and should they do it? Technically they can but if any other team offers a first round pick we know for a fact that it will be better than 32. Sweetening the offer just makes it less likely that Seattle’s making a good deal.

zezinhom asked if Schneider “will” and my answer is never say never but I think he won’t. As far as other veterans worthy of a first round draft pick, I’ve tested the waters with a top-tier receiving complement for JSN. Or basically any great player who is under 26 and not coming off of a knee injury.

DewHub asked if the Seahawks could address an edge rusher with the 32nd pick in the draft, while zezinhom asked what guys could be “clustered” in the first two rounds.

• Previously I’ve projected that probable positions to address early would be an EDGE/WR/CB in the first two rounds.

• The order wouldn’t matter too much.

• The WR class, as usual, is deep enough to think that maybe Seattle would hold off in the first round and start with EDGE or CB

• If an interior offensive lineman fell to the Seahawks again, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to settle the AB problem

Mostly I think fans wanted to know about the Maxx Crosby odds and I’d say that until further notice they aren’t very good even though it was reported that Seattle tried to trade for him last year.

Bret: Are we “stuck” with an internal OC hire, or do you believe we might’ve gone that way even if we’d have had the same amount of time as other franchises to locate a replacement? I hope we don’t have an exodus of coaches.

I believe the Seahawks expected Klint Kubiak to leave if he did what he was hired to do and therefore were always planning to promote from within, but let’s turn this into a different question:

Who exactly were the “star” offensive coordinator hires that anyone feels jealous about? I don’t think the NFL’s 2026 coaching cycle was very good.

Sure, we might come to find out in a year that “so-and-so” turned out to be a great hire, but I’m not so jealous of the new crop of offensive coordinators:

• Mike McDaniel: Fired guy with a bottom-10 offense the last two years

• Eric Beiniemy, Brian Daboll, Frank Reich, Pete Carmichael, Bobby Slowik: Retreads

• Davis Webb, Brian Angelichio, Travis Switzer, Declan Doyle: We’ll see

McDaniel was the one most said they wanted and that’s fine, he’s probably a good hire! I’m not losing sleep.

That’s the AFC. What about the NFC?

Did fans want Matt Nagy? Tommy Rees? Nathaniel Hackett? Press Taylor? The Eagles were so unimpressed with the options that they hired Sean Mannion, a guy who was a quarterback on the Seahawks practice squad a few years ago. Dan Quinn hired David Blough, a guy who was a quarterback on the Lions practice squad a few years ago.

I’m not really seeing a missed opportunity out of the 17 previous hires.

And by the way—that means the NFL will eventually have 20(!!!) new offensive coordinators this season. A bad hire means you’ll have a new OC next year and a great hire also means you’ll have a new OC next year.

It’s going to be very lucky to get an OC who turns out to be great AND poisonous in the way that Steve Spagnuolo is as a DC for the Chiefs, keeping him on Andy Reid’s staff for years on end. Or Josh McDaniels on the Patriots.

Barring that, the Seahawks always have to plan as if they will need a new OC “next year” and that means Mike Macdonald is aware of the importance of training the coaches who are already on the staff to be ready for the opportunity when it knocks.

The Seahawks aren’t stuck with anything they didn’t expect to stick. If they had been able to hire someone three weeks ago, I’m not convinced they saw a better Kubiak replacement than the one they’ll pick in the coming days.

Seaside Joe 2537