Why do the Seahawks so often go against NFL norms in the draft? It’s how they view players

It started with their first Seahawks draft: Kam Chancellor, a former quarterback recruit by Virginia Tech.

A year later, it was Richard Sherman, another fifth-round pick. He’d been a wide receiver at Stanford.

Bruce Irvin, whom Seattle supposedly way overdrafted in round one in 2012. Russell Wilson, too short to be an NFL quarterback that same year.

More recently: Frank Clark and Malik McDowell as top draft choices, despite red flags about them throughout the league. Turning college safety Tre Flowers into an NFL starting cornerback, a position he’d never played. Trading up to draft ... a punter (?) before Michael Dickson became a rookie All-Pro.

For 12 years and 12 drafts running, the Seahawks, coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider have often gone counter to what the rest of the league sees and does.

It has worked magically — such as Wilson, Sherman and Chancellor leading Seattle to its only Super Bowl win at the end of the 2013 season, and Clark overcoming his past to star as a Seahawks pass rusher.

It also has failed, particularly lately: Flowers getting benched then waived; McDowell never playing in a game for the Seahawks; L.J. Collier producing little since they drafted the lesser-regarded defensive end in the first round in 2019.

Thursday, for the 2022 NFL draft, the Seahawks have the highest pick they’ve owned since 2010. It’s ninth overall, one of the five draft picks and three players Seattle got from Denver for trading Wilson to the Broncos last month.

The draft “experts” are projecting the Seahawks to draft LSU cornerback Derek Stingley Jr., Liberty quarterback Malik Willis and — as NBC Sports’ Peter King assessed Monday — Oregon defensive end Kayvon Thibodeaux.

Some, including The News Tribune in its annual mock draft, see Seattle trading in the first round, as it has for nine of the team’s last 10 first-round picks.

Yet history says the Seahawks are going their own way in Round 1 and with their current stack of eight total picks in this draft, including three choices in the first 49 selections. And that way is likely to be one few saw coming.

In prospects, the Seahawks value what others don’t.

“No, it hasn’t changed,” Schneider said last week. “It’s the way our grading scale is. We’ve added to it. Since we’ve been here, we’ve adjusted some things and tweaked things along the way, but I say our grading scale is really like Al Davis, Dick Steinberg and, and Ron Wolf kind of combined And we’ve added a couple things to it. ...

“And that includes drafting for your team, not necessarily for the league. So that’s sometimes why you see rankings or whatever in the media, and we draft for our team. We don’t draft for how the league feels about people. That’s where you get in trouble.”

It’s the question as old as the game: Should you draft for need? Should you take the best available player when it’s your turn to pick?

The Seahawks have under Carroll and Schneider usually taken what they have on their draft board as the best available player, regardless of position, round — and what anyone else thinks of him.

That’s why they traded up with New England into the end of the second round in 2019 and took DK Metcalf. The hulking Mississippi wide receiver was way off some team’s draft board in 2019.

Much of the league saw that Metcalf ran pretty much only go routes in college at Ole Miss — and that a doctor had told Metcalf months earlier his football career was over because of a neck injury and surgery. The Seahawks saw a physical freak who found a safe path out of surgery and could dominate NFL defenses in one-on-one matchups.

Metcalf set the Seahawks’ record with 1,303 yards receiving and made the Pro Bowl in his second season, 2020. He’s about to get a new contract likely worth $25 million per year.

Much of the league saw McDowell have maturity issues and basically pout his way through the end of an initially breakout college career at Michigan State. That didn’t stop Carroll and Schneider from taking the long, athletic defensive lineman with Seattle’s top choice in 2017. They thought they could coach and lead the best version of McDowell.

McDowell sustained serious head injuries in a mysterious ATV accident soon after his first Seahawks minicamp. He never played for the team. Seattle released him and sued him in 2019 to get back signing-bonus money.

In 2020, the Seahawks were done drafting. But there was this huge wide receiver with a remarkable upbringing of having being taken from his parent and living for a time under a freeway overpass who had played at LSU for coach Ed Orgeron. Carroll and Orgeron are friends from their college coaching pasts. The rest of the league saw Stephen Sullivan that year as an undrafted free agent, at best. The Seahawks saw a wide receiver big enough to play tight end and perhaps defensive end, which they also ultimately tried.

Seattle traded back into the draft and took Sullivan in the seventh round. He played in one game for the Seahawks, 22 snaps at defensive end his rookie season. He’s now with the Carolina Panthers and GM Scott Fitterer, Schneider’s assistant with the Seahawks through the 2020 season.

“As outsiders would look at, you look at the numbers as they have been and as they may have been in the past. We don’t look at that way,” Carroll said last week. “We look at where they were, but we’re looking at where they can go under our guidance and how we can enhance and bring out the best in guys.

“And that’s an exciting part of this thing. We project forward. We’ll base our re-evaluations down the road. ...

“It’s easy to look at where everybody’s from: ‘OK you’re getting exactly this. And you’re getting exactly that.’ I don’t know that that’s really the case. We’re going to put our own little touch on these guys and see if we can draw out some stuff and some part of their play that maybe we haven’t seen (in a player’s past) that we’re looking forward to.”

At age 70, Carroll remains the key to this approach of drafting prospects for roles that maximize their best talents, not necessarily for the roles the Seahawks need them to fit. Schneider says he and his scouting staff rely on Carroll’s ability to relate to and bring out the best versions of young players.

That leads to why the Seahawks’ draft board often looks like its printed in a foreign language compared to most teams’.

“I think the excitement of it is knowing how Pete affects people, and then, how he affects his staff, and then how his staff is going to affect the players,” the Seahawks GM said. “That’s a pretty cool thing to see, when you have established players that you can study on film and just watch what they’ve been through, how they performed, and then try to project how they’re going to do.”

They try to make that true of every player Carroll and Schneider bring to the Seahawks.

It’s absolutely how they draft. It hasn’t always worked out, particularly lately, but it’s how and why they draft as they do.

“When we look at our guys — and whether they’re free agents, were part of a trade, or part of the draft — we’re looking for where we think we can take them,” Carroll said. “It might not be exactly the same as they’re viewed by others; as John was talking about, we draft for our own team. And that includes the way we look at a particular player.

“The basic thought that I’ve shared with you guys before is we’re looking to see something special in these guys. Then we want that to come to the front. We’re not trying to just stick them in a particular box of style. We want to see if we can come up with something and really enhance what they have, what they bring.

“It’s a big part of (it). It’s an exciting part of it.”