theinstrumental

Grand scheme, there are worse things than a year like this. Bryce has every tool he needs to succeed. The defense will be bad. If the offense is great, we’ll have a mid-round pick to use on the defense. If the offense is terrible, we’ll have a high one to use on Bryce’s replacement.

Saw some ideas that these safety/linebacker tweener types might become a little more valuable given the return of the kickoff. Looks like a great coverage player and locker room guy. You can do a lot worse in the 7th.

Grabbing a real NFL defensive lineman in the sixth feels like a win. Nice work.

If things ever get so bad that we have to get excited about a sixth-round QB pick, we should all just find a new team.

lol just saw the pick: completely adequate athlete and I've never thought anything else! His game speed's better than his timed speed, etc.

He's slow. And he's small. Not a lot of good tight ends who are small and slow.

That is fair but I think everyone's remembering how bad things looked for Bryce last year and forgetting that there's a whole other side of the ball. Starting corner > backup center. Ditto safety and any dream of a plan at edge rusher.

I don’t get the urgency to invest in center after signing $150M worth of guards with Corbett still around. Lots of centers convert from other positions. Why would everyone have been cool with it if, say, Barton converted coming out of college, but it’s a problem now that Corbett’s doing it in the NFL?

There's probably not a receiving tight end here who's an immediate upgrade over the guys we have, unfortunately. Just not a good draft for that position. Cade Stover's cool, but that is a converted linebacker, not a natural receiver. And yes, I know about JT Sanders, but he's not the caliber of athlete that our FO targets, or frankly the kind that usually ends up succeeding at tight end. Athleticism concerns probably knock out TJ Tampa, as well, unless they see him converting to safety. I'd love Malik Washington but it seems like one of Legette or Mingo can be a dynamic big slot. Honestly, I could talk myself into five or six receivers--it's a really, really deep class--but after spending pretty serious assets at every single starting position on offense except tight end, we can probably chill on offense. Jaden Hicks looks nice. Dorlus is a legit NFL defensive linemen and there are never enough of those. Any pass rusher with a pulse would be cool. Khyree Jackson is the kind of long corner that they might like, even though he will be a 25 year old rookie. It's the fourth round. Lots of solid players, nobody really exciting.

That's long been the MO of the Seattle front office that the Fitterer/Morgan network graduated out of. Unlikely to change.

First pick of the 3rd round will happen later tonight.

OK time to win some shootouts.

Gave up 52, 142, and 155. So both fifths to move up in the second.

It's Jaycee and nobody at corner so I can see a double-dip. But I'd really prefer to get Kneeland and have some kind of future plan at pass-rusher and try to get a corner in the third.

Yeah, you kind of have to hope the injuries have just been bad luck. We're not going to gain anything by messing around with trying to get him back cheap.

Ekwonu ran a sub-5.0 40. 97th percentile for all offensive tackles. His athleticism is his best trait. He’ll be fine in any run-blocking scheme ever devised. It’s the other kind of blocking that gives him trouble.

They have not done that at all. Ekwonu, Moton, and BC were 1st, 2nd, and 3rd round picks, respectively. Corbett was a premium FA. Bozeman's the only relatively low-cost signing of the starting five, and we've grabbed Mays and Zavala in back-to-back day 3's.

Moton is our best offensive player and should stay where he is. We know the best five is Ekwonu - Christensen - Bozeman - Corbett - Moton. We've seen it be good when it wasn't complicated by injury. If you want to make an improvement, it's probably only done by drafting for immediate depth/competition and sliding those guys around as needed. You can do that at LT, kicking Ekwonu inside, or G, and in either case allowing BC to be a jack-of-all-trades reserve. Another option is to draft a C who can immediately play G, moving BC to the bench and eventually promoting him again when it's time for the C to replace Bozeman. Point is, the line is not as good as we thought it was going into last year, but it's not as bad as it looked, either. As always, smart investments to the depth of the line are useful. There will be injuries, and we must be prepared, but OL isn't the only place on the roster that needs help.

Yeah but at least we know who our starting guard will be for the next 10 seasons.

The grading system doesn't scale based on how important a play is. Icky's missed block on the 4th-down sack was just one missed block. Jamison's crushing Jefferson was just one tackle. If every other play slightly contradicts those two, we probably never notice and their grade comes out looking nuts.

We got behind the sticks a lot this game, too. False starts are common in Seattle, but it's been bad all year. It's hard to come out and run on 1st and 15.

People really start and stop at the weight column when they think about interior linemen.

He’s very good. He doesn’t affect the QB enough to get to “elite,” but he’s as good of a run defender as you’re going to find.

We're so close to being on the same page. We don't know how these guys are going to turn out. So you can't evaluate the players. But we do, generally, know how valuable each pick is. And we can evaluate whether you create or destroy draft pick value in a given deal. The results are unknown, but you can evaluate the process. We destroyed value here. Bad process.

Just a good football player. Love it.