I'm surprised at this trade. Not unpleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless.
This isn't a hugely good move for Houston. They expose their thrilling new franchise QB in exchange for a cornerback who's been underperforming since his injury in XLIX and a 2nd-rounder. I'm pretty sure, just like the Kearse trade, that the 2nd-rounder was probably more than 50% of the trade, and it's going to be more like a high 3rd-rounder, really, given Seattle's likely drafting position. I guess Rick Smith wanted something out of Brown's likely departure after this season, but a premiere left tackle seems like a high price - especially given Houston's potential as a playoff contender this season and ESPECIALLY after Brown actually ended his holdout and played.
One might be tempted to laud Schneider as a wizard today, but the benefits have their limits for Seattle, too. We get a very good but aging left tackle. There's a reason 32-year-old players make GM's hesitate; should Brown suffer an injury (God forbid knock on wood throw salt over the left shoulder REVERSE JINX), he has only one or two more years of quality play ahead of him to justify the trade. A draftee, on the other hand, would have ten and a more resilient body. Would having that (essentially) high 3rd-rounder back get us a Duane Brown-quality player in the draft? Not as likely, but it would still stand a good chance of landing us a league-average-or-above. A lot of people here on this board were high (whether justifiably or not) on tackles who wound up going early or mid 2nd.
Now we don't have another 2nd-rounder now until 2020. That's a lot less draft capital to play with, especially in a market where good tackles are increasingly at a premium (and George Fant remains an unknown).
It's also a little weird to see so many people in this thread hailing this trade as urgently necessary and trashing our entire OL after they've been (by all accounts) improving dramatically as a unit for a month, and especially right after a game in which Russell Wilson threw for 452 yards and four touchdowns despite still playing behind Rees Odhiambo. I won't harp on this point too much because that OL wouldn't look as good against a defense offering better than a depleted Houston DL and a secondary that's just as bad as Jeremy Lane, but seriously - if there's a QB out there not named DeShaun Watson who's more immune to OL problems than Wilson, let me know. The position just isn't as important on this team. I don't know how many more years of high performance Wilson needs to display before folks start changing their narratives accordingly. One gets the sense that Wilson could still be pulling his Houdinis at age 45 after three Super Bowl wins and people would still be insisting that we're wasting our franchise QB.
Where the trade might really come through for the Seahawks is in the run game. Brown comes from a Houston line that was amongst the best in zone blocking (an accomplishment their RBs haven't really exploited) and he himself was apparently ranked 7th in the league at his position in run blocking. If this allows us to run to the left where we couldn't before, the value becomes tremendous given our need to shore up the running game and, accordingly, our playoff prospects.
This is a win-now move. It's a decent win-now move and significantly improves us this year, but it's not as brilliant as the Sheldon Richardson trade and it might not have happened at all without 1) Brown's discontent and 2) a lot of dumbness amongst several people in the Texans organization, including its mouth-running owner. Much of the trade's value comes from Wilson's willingness to restructure his own contract, which makes sense but wasn't necessarily something that any of us could see coming. It is, however, significantly better than giving up Jimmy Graham, so in that sense, one could call it modest highway robbery on John Schneider's part.
