What was the Seahawks best move of the offseason?

From hiring Mike Macdonald to re-signing Leonard Williams to drafting Byron Murphy: Seaside Joe 1887

It would be so easy to say that hiring Mike Macdonald was the best move of the Seahawks offseason that it makes me not want to say it. Besides, hiring a new head coach can’t even be compared to signing a free agent or drafting a player or making a trade. It’s not apples to oranges, it’s teachers to students or architects to concert halls.

Every player transaction that the Seahawks made from 2010 to 2023 was attached to Pete Carroll’s name, so that sort of impact can’t be compared to signing Zach Miller or Sidney Rice to free agent contracts or trading for Jamal Adams.

If a company buys another company, that’s a move. If a company fires a CEO and brings in an external hire to shake things up, that’s a movement.

Plus, is hiring Mike Macdonald a good move? We are all mostly in agreement that we like it and wanted Seattle to hire him of all the available options. That’s great and all, but while Sean McVay was considered a questionable decision by the Rams in 2017 because of his age, Brandon Staley was cited as the premier hire of 2021 when he went to the Chargers.

Judging Macdonald’s value before he’s ever coached a game is like giving out immediate draft grades or writing a review on IMDb before you saw a movie that won’t be out for months. Good for him, good for us, if Mike Macdonald is anywhere close to as successful as Pete Carroll. This August’s first training camp will be our first good chance to gauge—not the quality of the hire because it’s still too soon to do that and there will be a lot of meaningless noise in the media based on people overreacting to minor news during his first camp—but at least to start to feel how practices are different now compared to the past 14 years.

So for me, Mike Macdonald can’t be the best move because he’s in a different category of “franchise decisions” and there’s nothing to really know about his value as a head coach until we see it in action.

And yet clearly it also felt necessary for me to open this newsletter writing about how significant firing Pete Carroll and hiring Mike Macdonald certainly is with regards to how successful Seattle’s 2024 offseason will come to be judged in a few years.

I would have supported firing or keeping Carroll, but if I would support firing a head coach then am I truly in favor of keeping him? Now that what’s done is done, I might just be excited about change and Macdonald is definitely the head coach who I was most supportive of as a replacement option.

Aside from that major decision, what was the Seahawks best move of the 2024 offseason so far?

Honorable mention: Cutting Quandre Diggs, Jamal Adams, Will Dissly

I can’t say this was the best move because I don’t really identify with the argument to keep any of these players. The Seahawks cut Diggs, Adams, and Dissly on March 5th, creating cap space necessary to keep Leonard Williams and so forth.

I know everyone was supportive of releasing Adams—I’m not sure why rumors persist about him being brought back other than to assume that reporters keep hearing that it is possible—but Diggs and Dissly were harder cases for fans to accept. Dissly signed with the Chargers right away, but Adams and Diggs are unsigned. Teams see an opportunity here to either have an amazing safety who you pay or don’t pay a safety at all.

Honorable mention: Not re-signing Jordyn Brooks or Damien Lewis

Kind of like Diggs and Dissly, I’m not arguing that these players don’t belong in the NFL or wouldn’t help the Seahawks. Only that there has to be a line in the sand with regards to how much Seattle must be willing to pay them to be on the team and Brooks, Lewis got overpaid.

There was a version of the Seahawks in the past, before Pete mostly, in which Seattle would overpay old players to stay on the team. Pete did it at times too, but not to the degree of re-signing Shaun Alexander in 2006.

Plus, the overpays of Brooks in Miami and Lewis in Carolina will give back fourth and fifth round comp picks (projected) in 2025.

After all the fear of “What will Seattle do now without their guards who weren’t all that consistently impressive to be real about it?”, I think that Christian Haynes, Laken Tomlinson, some competition between Anthony Bradford, Sataoa Laumea, Mike Jerrell, Tremayne Anchrum is preferable to giving Lewis $13 million per season.

Jerome Baker feels like a good change of names, if nothing else, from Jordyn Brooks. I was ready for the Seahawks to move onto a player who didn’t have the pressure of being a first round pick who didn’t live up to the projection.

Not signing Bobby Wagner was in the stars by the end of the season, so that’s not even a question.

Not honorable mention: Re-signing Leonard Williams

I have absolutely no problem with giving Williams $21 million per season and the argument to do it is better than the argument to not do it. The Seahawks are low on proven impact football players and they’re running out of people worthy paying, so I understand the move. That’s fine.

I just can’t go above and beyond to say it might be the best move of the offseason when there’s absolutely no bargain to be had here: Leonard Williams is probably not a “$21 million player” as we know it, he hasn’t really proven in Seattle yet that he’s a dominant run defender and there’s nobody who thinks he will be a 10 sack guy either. He’s a very good player that a great defense needs, if the Seahawks ever plan to have a great defense again.

So let me repeat it: I think I would have re-signed Leonard Williams too!

But is it “the best move” to simply give a player top-of-the-market if not over-the-top-market money? No, there’s no “VALUE” here because Williams won’t give Seattle “$30 million” worth of defensive line contributions. That’s not who he is, even if he’s also the Seahawks best front-seven player right now.

Basically, it’s a wash instead of a win. Sometimes your team needs its washes as much as its wins.

I also liked re-signing Noah Fant. That was the right person to keep and he didn’t cost as much as I thought he would.

Honorable mention: Getting Tyler Lockett to take a pay cut

The Seahawks were going to cut Tyler Lockett if he didn’t take a pay cut. That’s not a rumor, that’s not something I heard or was reported, that’s just logical reasoning.

But if they cut him, they would have had to go find another player to take his job for about $5 million or so. The Seahawks simply convinced Lockett to be that player, reducing his base salary to $4.6 million and saving more money against the cap than by cutting him or trading him. It was the best contract move of Schneider’s offseason because Seattle was able to replace Lockett with Lockett.

Honorable mention: Playing the comp pick game

The Seahawks finally invested their moves in getting back comp picks next year, including signing players like Baker and Tomlinson and Rayshawn Jenkins because they were cut by their former teams and therefore didn’t cost Seattle any comp picks. Signing discount players like Johnathan Hankins, Anchru, Tyrel Dodson, K’Von Wallce, that plays into it too.

Overall, the Seahawks had the best free agency that they could have had with the amount of money that they were able to spend. It’s not over. The Seahawks still need to save money before the season starts and that could come in the form of a veteran cut, trade, pay cut, or restructure.

Best Move: Patient draft lands Byron Murphy II

Sitting at 16 in the draft, the Seahawks were really living on the border between “blue chip prospects” and “red chip prospects” so that would make a nervous, inexperienced GM either jump the gun to trade up or get indecisive and trade down.

Pete has said that one of Schneider’s greatest assets is his ability to know how the draft is going to play out and I’m not sure how confident he was that Murphy would be there, but the first 14 picks couldn’t have gone better for Seattle.

It gets more and more absurd to me that the Broncos picked Bo Nix at 12. It gave me all the vibes of the 2011 draft when three quarterbacks went in the top 10 (Cam Newton, Jake Locker, Blaine Gabbert), then the Vikings picked Christian Ponder at 12. GMs, coaches, owners convince themselves that there is such a thing as a “safe QB prospect with a low ceiling and a high floor” but said value doesn’t exist.

This isn’t to say that Nix couldn’t be a great player, that’s unfair for anyone to proclaim now, but there are always times when the entire draft community agrees that certain first round picks didn’t have first round grades. Any time that happens, it is rarely the case that the team was on the right side of history.

The Seahawks could have been one of these impatient teams—like the Broncos, as written on Tuesday—who said, “Damn, we’re not sure of our quarterbacks and we might not get another chance to be this high to pick one again” and traded up to 10 to get J.J. McCarthy. Sometimes those teams trade up for Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, I know.

Usually, that’s not what happens with a trade up.

If the Seahawks would have traded up, that’s fine. If they would have traded up for Murphy, we’d all be sitting here saying, “Wow, great move, they never would have gotten him at 16!”

Instead, Schneider saw what a lot of people saw which was that as soon as the Falcons took Michael Penix, it might be a while before we see any team choose a defensive player. It didn’t happen until Laiatu Latu to the Colts at 15, dropping Murphy into Seattle’s laps at 16. He’s a top-10 prospect, this drop by Murphy was about as close to Kyle Hamilton falling to 14 or Derwin James falling to 17 that the draft has had in the last two years.

And within that move to not trade up for a quarterback, I’ll of course add that trading for Sam Howell was not only the move I would have done out of all the available options, it was the move I wanted them to do before they did it:

So yeah I also liked trading for Sam Howell as Seattle’s move to find a quarterback to develop instead of other free agents, trade options, or draft picks.

What do you think was the best move of the offseason so far? Schneider always says that roster building is a 12-month job, it never ends, so this won’t have to be the last time we ask the question.

Another “W”inner

Thanks Seasider Paul for sharing that your household is liking the new shades! Here’s Sawyer in the “W” glasses: