What would you do for Seahawks to have top-5 OL?
Seahawks sacrifice: What would you give up for Seattle to have dominant OL? Seaside Joe 1943
When we talk about franchises having identities, any trend or trait that spans multiple decades, coaches, GMs, and sometimes even ownerships, as I wrote about a couple of weeks ago with regards to the Seahawks and quarterbacks, we probably focus more on what teams do well than what they don’t do at all.
The Seahawks have seemingly always liked running backs—I mean, Seattle has had more good running backs whose last name starts with a “W”* than the Bucs have had period through the entire alphabet—and they are far more likely to invest a first or second round pick into that position than they are to choose a quarterback even though that’s the opposite of the expectation generally.
*Curt Warner, Chris Warren, Ricky Watters, Kenneth Walker
Over the course of 50 drafts in franchise history, the Seahawks have picked more top-20 running backs (Warren, Shaun Alexander, John Williams) than top-20 quarterbacks (Rick Mirer, Dan McGwire). And between picks 20-74, Seattle has selected 10 running backs and zero quarterbacks. You’d probably expect a team to draft more running backs than quarterbacks merely out of attrition, but to only pick two top-74 quarterbacks over 50 years, especially when the Seahawks are not the team that went from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love, that’s not a coincidence.
It’s a philosophy. And of the Seahawks fans I’ve surveyed, avoiding quarterbacks more often than Jadeveon Clowney on a free rush is not the side of Seattle’s team-building history that most of you hate the most. If anything, I think Seahawks fans appreciate the team’s hesitancy to overpay or overrate the quarterback position. But that doesn’t mean that fans are entirely on board with the team’s frugalness at every position.
Somewhere within Seattle’s team-building philosophy is a trend that I’ve had a much harder time convincing most fans is real than having an immunity to quarterbacks: The Seahawks have never cared about the three players linedd up between the tackles.
Except for maybe this one guy…
Oh wait, not him either…
In the history of the Seahawks draft, Seattle has had 19 picks higher than 14th overall. Of those 19 picks, 11 played defense (three DTs, five DBs, two DEs, one LB), and on offense there has been one QB, one RB, two WRs, and four offensive tackles. It isn’t surprising to not see any guards or centers (just as it’s not surprising that there are no tight ends or kickers) but in the course of 50 years you still might expect to see at least one.
The Seahawks highest-drafted guard ever is Steve Hutchinson at 17th overall, one of only four Hall of Famers that Seattle has picked in the first round, but when it came time to guarantee that he would go into Canton as a Seahawk the team got cute in negotiations and lost him to the Vikings. I do not recall the Cowboys losing All-Pro guard Zack Martin in free agency during the middle of his career and Dallas has had a lot more players that they had to pay than the post-2005 Seahawks.
It was as if Seattle secretly begged Minnesota to put the poison pill in the contract so that they didn’t have to answer to their own fans why the Seahawks didn’t want to keep someone who actually might have been their best player if he had stayed in 2006; “Put the blame on the Vikings and Hutchinson so we don’t have to admit that we really just didn’t want to give a guard $50 million.”
I mean, it’s been almost 20 years since then and I still don’t think the Seahawks would pay a guard $50 million in the year 2024 even with the cost of veteran NFL players eclipsing the price tag for a civilian trip to space. They certainly didn’t want to match the $53 million that Damien Lewis got from the Carolina Panthers.
Seahawks 2024 OL spending
The Seahawks are set to rank 32nd in the NFL in offensive line spending for the 2024 season. The $26.45 million allocated to the offensive line is almost $6 million less than 31st-place Tennessee (a team that just picked a guard 11th overall in 2023 and then a tackle seventh overall in 2024) and is almost one-third the amount that first-place Carolina is paying for a $73.1 million unit that now includes Lewis.
And there isn’t really a reason yet to think that Seattle’s offensive line spending will increase in 2025, when the Seahawks are set to rank 31st in OL spending, only ahead of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (Which is almost certainly going to send the Seahawks back to 32nd place because the Bucs have to pay left tackle Tristan Wirfs between now and then.) The most logical way that Seattle’s OL spending would increase would be if the Seahawks acquired a costly big name veteran, something that the team hasn’t done at guard and center since…have they ever done that?
The team has added former first round picks in the past, like D.J. Fluker, Luke Joeckel, and Robert Gallery (who I think gets misreported as a “marquee free agent” even though he only got $5 million guaranteed), but never a guard or center who was highly-coveted around the league. When the team attempted to sign T.J. Lang in 2017, they lost him to the Lions over money. When the Seahawks could have solidified the interior of their offensive line for the next five years after going to back-to-back Super Bowls, they traded Pro Bowl center Max Unger to the Saints so that they wouldn’t have to pay him.
I know that most of you hate the fact that the Seahawks consistently put themselves in this position year after year with regards to the offensive line, but we should be able to agree that as much as Seattle wants to be known as a “defensive-minded franchise”, they’re just as content with being known as “offensive line haters”.
So today I put the question to you: What would you be willing to do to change the course of the Seahawks franchise by making them the type of team that would strive to have a top-5 offensive line year after year?
I’ll make make a couple of surveys that intend to answer that question and post the results later this week. But I also want to hear from you in the comments:
First, let’s dig a little bit deeper into Seattle’s organizational history with the offensive line, the present unit, and the probable future for the guard and center positions in 2025 and beyond…