There’s no right way to build a Super Bowl winner, but doing it through the draft is definitely the most cost-effective and probably also the most satisfying. The Seattle Seahawks fulfilled a Cinderella run to become Super Bowl champions on Sunday night by blowing out the New England Patriots in a game that was never as close as the 29-13 final score might indicate. Seattle’s elite defense absolutely brutalized Drake Maye all night, the offensive line opened up lanes for MVP Kenneth Walker III, and Sam Darnold managed the game well enough to win.
The Seahawks crushed the NFL Draft, and it built a Super Bowl winner
The Seahawks’ NFL Draft success shows a blueprint for how to win a Super Bowl
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
Seattle used all three ways to acquire talent — draft picks, trades, and free agent signings — in building their Super Bowl roster. Darnold was of course a free agent signing last offseason after the team moved on from Geno Smith. The Seahawks traded for Ernest Jones in the middle of last season and he turned into an All-Pro this year, while Rashid Shaheed was added via trade midway through this season. The bulk of the Seahawks’ core, however, was built through the draft. This Seattle championship happened because GM John Schneider hit on pick-after-pick to load up his team with cost controlled talent.
John Schneider has been on the job in Seattle since 2010, and had already built two Super Bowl teams (and one champion) before this year. He made a brilliant move two offseasons ago by hiring head coach Mike Macdonald away from Baltimore, where he was a defensive coordinator. His magic touch has really shown during the draft.
Dating back to 2022, Seattle nailed so many draft picks to build a lineup of cost-controlled impact who balled out on their rookie deals to win the team the Super Bowl. Just look at this list of impact players on Seattle’s Super Bowl that were drafted by the club and were playing on their rookie deals:
The parity that’s deeply ingrained in the NFL can be understood through the prism of rookie contracts. First-round picks get a four-year rookie deal with a fifth-year option that are slotted monetarily by draft position. Every other pick gets a four-year deal. These are the most team-friendly contracts in the sport, and really the only way to stack the roster with talent while keeping everyone under the salary cap. These players will all eventually seek a bigger payday, which will mean many of them leave the Seahawks for more money.
It all needs to be lined up perfectly to hit big, and even then you need good luck with health and random bounces of the ball. The Seahawks got it all on this Super Bowl run.
Want to build a great team? All you have to do is hit almost every draft pick, hire the right coaches, augment your core with sharp trades and free agent signings, and then pray no one important gets hurt. It’s so, so, so hard to win the Super Bowl, but the Seahawks just gave us the ultimate blueprint.
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