Eye-test meets numbers: Seahawks have no idea how to draft offensive line

The Seattle Seahawks have the projected third-most draft capital in the NFL over the next two years.

Accompanying that come a host of needs, including offensive line. I assume they will try to draft one.

They’re just not good at it.

Since 2014, when the Seattle draft magic suddenly wore off, perhaps no position has been as big a miss as the offensive line.

In fact, the Seahawks are one of only six teams to never draft an “A” caliber lineman. the Cincinnati Bengals, Miami Dolphins, Arizona Cardinals, New York Giants join Seattle in never finding an OL player ranked in the top 10% at their position. The Incompetent O’Briens Houston Texans are so much worse than even those teams it’s comical.

Had Seattle taken Center Creed Humphrey in last year’s draft at 56, they’d have one of those cool green dots way over to the right. Humphrey was PFF’s highest-graded center last year.

Russell Wilson aired his grievances about being hit too much in the 2020 offseason, and the firestorm that followed did not go the way he had hoped. Part 1 of that is the known and proven quantity of Wilson holding the ball too often. But Part 2 – what a person could reasonably assume he meant – is that the Seahawks are real bad at drafting linemen, and have only Duane Brown to definitively hang their hat on as successfully-acquired talent in recent years.

I’ve heard Charles Cross, Ikem Ekwonu, Trevor Penning, and Abraham Lucas as some of the most likely targets for John Schneider to draft this year. Naturally the skeptic in me assumes they’ll take somebody at #40 that makes the announcers quickly check their sheets for the fourth-round names.

Since almost everything is open to the team this year, it’s impossible to say what they’re going to do, which is more interesting than drafts we’ve had in a long time. I have a hard time seeing them go through the first three picks without taking a tackle or center, with fingers crossed very hard that it’s the Chosen One to break the Seahawks curse this time.