Seahawks seeking future at edge rusher, but do they lack the proper draft ammo?
Recent draft results suggests they might
There’s a wrinkle to the Russell Wilson trade that never gets talked about and that’s probably because it’s the only shade of the 2022 offseason that the Broncos won over the Seahawks.
About six months before the Russ trade, Denver sent Von Miller to the Rams for L.A.’s second and third round picks in 2022. That deal gave the Broncos slightly more agency to send four picks to Seattle for Wilson, including #9 and #40 in the 2022 draft.
The Seahawks picked Boye Mafe at 2.40 with Denver’s original pick
The Broncos picked Nik Bonitto at 2.64 with L.A.’s original pick
Four seasons later, Bonitto is the best edge rusher drafted on day two over the past five years and Mafe is on the Bengals.
Mafe is also by most measures one of the top-10 edge rushers drafted on day two since 2021. Which is both a minor feather in the cap for John Schneider and also a little bit worrisome when we talk about the possibility of the Seahawks drafting a day two edge rusher for the third time since 2022.
Mafe is 6th in both total career pressures and sacks for any day two picks in the last five years, although this comes with the caveat that he’s had more opportunities than some of the players on this list:
Also nine of those sacks came in 2023, which is the fifth-best single season sack total by any player on this list.
(Bonitto owns the top-two: 14 sacks in 2025 and 13.5 sacks in 2024.)
For me, these facts about Mafe’s place among his peers makes my heart palp a few too many tates, in the same way that I’ve been concerned with the deteriorating value of college quarterbacks. As fans, we desperately need good quarterbacks AND the violent pass rushers who thirst to put them on the ground.
Let’s hope that being (openly) paid millions of dollars in college hasn’t done too much to dissuade the passion for improvement.
It’s sort of like YouTube and TikTok sapping tomorrow’s generations of the next “Spielberg” or “Scorsese” as film directors by giving them riches and fame before they hone their talent because they had 10 million followers by sophomore year.
Instead of getting someone’s version of The Godfather, we’ll get “Rugrat1900 REACTS to celebrity pets on OZEMPIC!!”
The Seahawks hold the following top-100 picks:
1.32
2.64
3.96
We can only speculate how Schneider would prefer the draft to fall in April, but rarely will it seem so obvious that Seattle could stand to pick an edge rusher.
Normally I don’t question moves made by the Seahawks—not out of blind homerism, but due to my ignorance of what conversations are happening behind closed doors that could have explained their rationale—but if Schneider doesn’t pick an edge rusher this year…that’s one I’d have to push back on.
—DeMarcus Lawrence is by all accounts wrapping up his career soon
—Uchenna Nwosu and Derick Hall are in contract years
Seattle has settled zero moves to address an obvious need in free agency or trade. We don’t even know if Lawrence and Nwosu are long for the Seahawks this year, let alone 2027.
If the Seahawks do not draft that edge rusher in the first round (and even in many cases if they do), their odds of landing someone who they’ll be really happy with as Mafe replacements between 2026-2029 will drop to the single-digits.
That is a percentage that I kind of made up, but also kind of didn’t.
Recent Day 2 Edge Rushers
Bonitto is coincidentally the only player on this list who was drafted 64th overall, the same pick that the Seahawks own in the second round.
Since 2021, 59 players who Pro-Football-Reference identify as “outside linebackers” or “defensive ends” have been drafted between the 2nd-3rd rounds. If I expand that to all linebackers, the number goes up to 77. If I include defensive tackles, it increases to 107.
And even then Mafe has the sixth-most sacks in the group out of 107 prospects.
Seattle didn’t even want to keep Mafe. He seemed to have a horrible fit with Mike Macdonald.
Which isn’t to say that Mafe was a bad pick or is a bad player, but it emphasizes just how high the bar is for success and how difficult it is to reach that bar after the first round; it would be hard to enough to hit it at pick 32, which is also usually too late.
It’s kind of like buying your home electronics at a pawn shop. I don’t know who is buying that stuff or why anyone would pay $100 for a VCR.
Best of the Best
So I think the best day 2 edge rushers since 2021 have been these guys:
Nik Bonitto, Broncos (2.64)
Tui Tuipulotu, Chargers (2.54)
Byron Young, Rams (3.77)
YaYa Diaby, Bucs (3.82)
Nic Scourton, Panthers (2.51)
Azeez Ojulari, Giants (2.50)
Mafe, Seahawks (2.40)
Derick Hall, Seahawks (2.37)
Dayo Odeyingbo, Colts (2.54)
So good were some of these picks that Mafe, Ojulari, and Odeyingbo all switched teams after four seasons. Hall could be the next. We could get into the guys who didn’t make the list, like Arnold Ebiketie, another player with Mafe-like success who just left the Falcons for a one-year contract on the Eagles.
Or Joseph Ossai or Malcolm Koonce or Patrick Jones or Logan Hall. And those are the semi-successful examples.
If I called out the bottom-60 or so players in this group, it’s a laundry list of guys barely hanging onto the league and they were day two picks in the last five years. Heck even Chazz Surratt, a key Seattle special teamer, was a third round pick. Surratt only went 14 picks after pick 64.
And even someone like Tuipulotu, arguably the #2 player on the list, must continue to build upon his first really good season in 2025.
A list, by the way, that you may have noticed is mostly composed of players drafted before pick 64.
What made Bonitto special?
There’s never going to be a clear cut answer as to why someone was a draft steal, at least not in a way that will be useful. If that were the case, those types of players would never fall in the draft again.
In 2022, Mile High Report cited that Bonitto had explosive athleticism that could help him overcome being undersized.
There’s plenty of reasons to love the Bonitto pick. He’s very twitched up and should be a real chore for tackles when he’s rushing from a wide 9 technique. He enters the league with a good enough repertoire to give opponents trouble, even if he’d benefit from using them all more often. His go-to move is a speed rush and that makes sense with his ability to fly by blockers, but he also brings a promising spin and swipe.
A couple of years later, after he had started to establish himself as one of the top edge rushers in the NFL, SI’s Broncos blog highlighted that Bonitto was a difficult evaluation because he had played on Oklahoma’s “slanting front” defense:
At Oklahoma, the Sooners used a slanting defensive front, which made things extremely easy for their front-seven players.
It put offensive linemen behind almost off the snap, and over the years, very few players have come from slanting defensive fronts and found success in the NFL. Slanting fronts attack the gaps with speed and athleticism, which worked for Bonitto but raised questions about his ability to hold up when working straight up on a one-on-one block.
SI also noted that Bonitto didn’t have much of a pass rush arsenal when he entered the NFL, relying solely on speed when he’s unblocked, but that he worked on his game and got better over several offseasons. He also wasn’t, and isn’t, exceptionally good against the run.
Being able to stop the run will be more of a non-negotiable for Macdonald.
Whether there could be edge rushers in the 2026 draft who fit the bill for Seattle’s clear need at the position is something that we will have to examine over the next month. Perhaps we won’t come to anything solid before that happens, but once the Seahawks do decide on an heir apparent then maybe it will be John Schneider’s turn to land a hit at pick 2.64.