Will Seahawks make any trades prior to 2024 season?

On who the Seahawks could trade, why offensive line rankings don't matter, and Byron Murphy's rookie snaps: Seaside Joe 1912

The Seahawks have offseason OTA workouts on and off between now and Juny 7, then a mandatory minicamp from June 11-13. Until then, time to answer more questions from Super Joes in part three of last week’s Super Joes Q and A. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here:

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Seasider Danno: Who is, or who are the most likely Seahawks to be traded before the start of the season?

Sometimes name players are traded in August and September, such as when Seattle acquired Jadeveon Clowney on August 31, 2019 or Sheldon Richardson on September 1, 2017. It’s not as common for the Seahawks to part with notable players between training camp and the start of the season: The team traded Ugo Amadi to the Eagles for J.J. Arcega-Whiteside in 2022; sent Ahkello Witherspoon to the Steelers in 2021 before he had ever played for Seattle; and shipped Cassius Marsh to the Patriots in 2018.

Any example previous to 2018 is also going to include names we barely remember, such as Kevin Norwood, John Moffitt, and Christine Michael, a player we remember but wish I could forget.

So if I’m to draw an answer to this question using John Schneider’s trade history and “what is most likely?” then I won’t say a big name. I’ll say a recent draft pick who has underwhelmed but might be enticing in a change-of-scenery such as Dee Eskridge or Stone Forsythe. And yeah, the trade return would be like a conditional seventh round pick swap in 2027. In your post Danno, you mentioned Tre Brown and Mike Jackson, those seem like reasonable answers too especially because there’s a new coaching staff in place.

A general rule of thumb that I suggest to use with any proposed trade idea: GET YOUR HOPES DOWN. Not up, down. It’s hard enough to move the needle with a deadline trade for an actually-good player, so we shouldn’t expect any fortune-changing trades between now and September. But a team might see Eskridge as a player who can compete on kick returns and be willing to send back another receiver who is no longer valued by his current organization like Terrace Marshall or Tylan Wallace.

Seasider Loaf Bench: What unproven newness intrigues you the most?... perhaps a top 5, so much to choose from this year! Coaches, signings, rookies, scheme, culture etc... it's all so exciting. A little digest and run down as to whys n what not would be great.

1 - What do the Seahawks look like two years after John Schneider has made all the decisions on his own?

2 - Can Mike Macdonald have the Seahawks back to a top-5 defense by 2025?

3 - Will Byron Murphy II team with Devon Witherspoon to be Seattle’s version of having Quinnen Williams and Sauce Gardner, or better yet Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey?

4 - Sam Howell time

5 - Scott Huff building an offensive line in his vision with Ryan Grubb and the Seahawks starters being among the most athletic and versatile in the NFL

Seaside (Lou) Slugger: I came across this article the other day. The point was to draw a correlation between Seattle’s chances with the quality of their offensive line. The problem in my mind is that this article (or others that are close) doesn’t support the idea that top OLs win championships. Last year the Super Bowl was between the 6th & 13th best lines. The top 4 offenses in the AFC are 13,18,19,20th. Of the top 10 lines. Only KC & Detroit had any post season success.

Can you think of any examples that prove this list is an anomaly? Is the success of your OL and winning games an unproven correlation?

I ended up having about four things to say about the offensive line, not necessarily all related to your questio exactly but this helped me organize some takes on: Injuries, depth, planning, rebuilding, and rankings.

Injuries: I think one of the absurd things about expecting a certain outcome from a team’s offensive line is that unlike quarterback or running back or even tight end and receiver, offensive line expectations necessitate FIVE players to stay healthy for 17 to 21 games! If one of the five goes down, a fate that will befall multiple starters every year, the unit is only as strong as its weakest link.

Depth: The Detroit Lions could have the best offensive line in the NFL, but they had to start Kayode Awosika at left guard in the most important game of the season. Right tackle Penei Sewell was the only offensive lineman to start all 17 games and the playoffs, everyone else missed two and regular left guard Jonah Jackson had thigh, wrist, ankle, and knee injuries that cost him five regular season and three playoff games. The Lions had to give 700 combined snaps to Awosika, Halapulivaati Vaitai, and Colby Sorsdal to fill their needs.

Planning: I’ve only heard of one of those players and I really try to stay in touch; by the way, the Lions paid Vatai a five-year, $50 million contract and injuries forced him into being a backup.

All of which is to say that the Seahawks could sign five All-Pro offensive linemen, it’s not necessarily going to give Seattle an All-Pro offensive line. I think it is the abundance of needs for that unit—not just for the Seahawks, but for all 32 teams—that makes offensive line a constant source of worry for fans. There’s for sure nothing the Seahawks can do in the next 12 months that would prevent the offensive line from having big needs in a year, so we will keep cycling back to it because every offense has to have five starters and at least three players backing them up who are as good as starters.

Even the Lions had to sign Kevin Zeitler to replace Jonah Jackson and then drafted two more offensive linemen. The Panthers have the most expensive offensive line in the NFL now because they had to sign players to replace ones who they just drafted recently and gave up on after one or two seasons.

Rebuilding: You asked about the correlation between offensive line success and team success. Well, for one there is no one “thing” that makes a team win a Super Bowl and the biggest factor of all is luck. Having a great quarterback like Patrick Mahomes is a huge help, but weren’t Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, and Warren Moon all great quarterbacks? Having a great coach like Bill Belichick should be a priority, but Pete Carroll is the best coach in franchise history and the Seahawks struggled to get past the divisional round of the playoffs for the past nine years.

There’s just no throughline between every Super Bowl, or even the past 10 Super Bowls, that will give anyone a satisfying answer for “Does (THIS) lead to winning more games, more playoff games, and more championship games?”

It’s all of it. It’s coaching, quarterback, run blocking, pass blocking, defense, pressuring the quarterback, special teams, strength of schedule, strength of division and conference, wind speeds, percipitation, temperature on the field, quality of refereeing, and what the weakside defensive end had for dinner last night.

Winning: So when I see a writer or a content creator or a fan or an A.I. posit a get rich quick scheme to win a Super Bowl by doing this one cool trick—for example, Mike Sando looking at the Chiefs for about three minutes and deciding that there’s just one reason why Kansas City has won the last two Super Bowls (“they don’t have a star wide receiver, that’s all there is to it!”)—I know there’s something fishy afoot. There’s no one cool trick.

a) the Seahawks could have a good offensive line this season and still be 9-8, or they could have problems on the offensive line and win the division, similar to winning the Super Bowl when Russell Okung was out for half the year

b) teams don’t need a “good offensive line” just like one catch-all as if all games are created equal, similar to when I wrote that there’s no such thing as a “top-10 quarterback”; well, what is your offensive line good AT? are they good against all teams, or are they only good against the Cardinals and Panthers? does a “good” offensive line matter if they crumble every time they face Nick Bosa or T.J. Watt? is the offensive line good in run blocking but struggle to pass protect or vice versa? is the offensive line good in September and October, but bad in November and December? are you starting the same five players for every game? Probably not!

Ranking: I’m pretty tired of these after-season catch-all rankings and statistics that sites like PFF come up with, “The Chiefs had the X-best offensive line?” Did they? When did they? Every single week they were exactly the X-best offensive line in the NFL? I have no idea what the Seahawks offensive line was ranked in 2023—surely if you reference five different sources, you’ll get five different answers—and would it even matter given that Abe Lucas missed most of the season? None of the “sources” on offensive line ranking, quality, and correlation to success matter to me, what I care about is “When I watch the Seahawks play offense, do I have positive, negative, or neutral feelings about the NFL?” It’s not as comforting as a ranking number, my “feelings” surely won’t be transferrable from one person to another, but that’s what I really concern myself with.

Do the Seahawks need to have a great offensive line to win a Super Bowl? Anything “great” added to the mix should help, as long as it doesn’t conflict with other things in the recipe that are already great. Quarterback, coaching, defense, line, managing the salary cap, the draft, and last night’s arroz con pollo. It all matters. As soon as we try to pluck out “what matters the most”, we’ll inevitably just be seeking confirmation on what we already believed before we started. I’ve long sought the answer as to what a franchise must do to win the Super Bowl and after many years of thinking I could find out, I have accepted that there’s no one cool trick.

Seasider Eduardo: I'm interested to see who's snaps are interrupted/modified by the drafting of Murphy. The obvious answer seems to be he'll pick up snaps from Dre'mont Jones as he transitions to more of a D-end role, but they were already playing Dre on the outside at the end of the season, so not sure. Is it that Murphy displaces Reed's or Williams' snaps, or will they look to gain more effectiveness by rotating within their D-linemen more an lower everyone's % of snaps as a result?

I would say that the average number of snaps for a rookie first round defensive tackle in most cases is 500-600. Last season, Jarran Reed had 809, Dre’Mont Jones had 762, Leonard Williams had 524 after he got to Seattle, Mario Edwards had 392, and Cameron Young had 205. Edwards is gone, Jones has moved, Reed probably doesn’t need as many snaps as he got last year, and even if Johnathan Hankins gets 300-400 snaps, I don’t think it will be that hard to find 500 snaps for Murphy.

But if Murphy gets 300 snaps, similar to Jordan Davis’s first-season usage with the Eagles in 2022, it wouldn’t bother me. I really like the premise of giving rookies room to breathe without judgment and waiting until year two for results.

Seasider Scott M: Would like to know more about the kickoff change....rules, strategies, etc? Any indications as to how ST's Coach J Harbaugh might be approaching this?

All the kickoff rules can be found at the NFL website, I don’t think there’s anything I could add to them and any attempt would probably only confuse the changes even more. Teams are going to have to wait-and-see until preseason, scrimmages, and the regular season for answers to reveal themselves to the coaches and players as to what will be the most successful strategy under the new format. Sorry, I can’t give a better answer than that and I don’t know who really could at this point. I’d venture to guess that nobody knows and that Jay Harbaugh isn’t going to reveal his secrets and thoughts while strategy is still proprietary information.

But together, you and I can both excitedly wait for games to happen and free kicks to be witnessed in real time. I’m as curious as you are.

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