Seymour":1i4m13l5 said:
I can sum this issue up in 2 words.
Roster depth.
Now that everyone is paid, depth took a big hit, and we are carrying far more rookies and cheaper players than before.
Better get used to it IMO.
It's the type of thing that can fluctuate so I don't know if it's something that people will just have to get used to, but absolutely agreed with your point.
I think for awhile almost all (?) Hawks fans took it as a point of pride that the Hawks roster had the highest percentage of young UDFAs on the 53 by a pretty wide margin (it was part of the "genius" of JS/PC), but over time it has become apparent that they're just good talent evaluators, rather than the best talent evaluators in history (a string of a few historically amazing drafts, followed by a string of really bad drafts, not counting the past two because we don't know what those will result in yet).
In any case, with poor drafting and such a heavy reliance on undrafted UDFAs of course your special teams are going to suffer.
Part of it I think is just the way that JS/PC speculate for talent, as they seem to -- really more than any other team -- try to find value by just taking amazing athletes who fly off the charts in height/weight/speed measures under the belief that they can turn them into football players. When you hit on one of those you found a perennial pro-bowler, but the hit rate on that strategy is really low too. It was, after all, the strategy used by the late-Al Davis Raiders (although the Seahawks won't ever get that bad in this window because unlike those Raiders they already have a pretty large core of All Pros in place).
So, not to beat a dead horse, but as I've said before, I think once that All Pro core was in place I thought the Seahawks should have shifted strategies and gone for really safe depth picks and average starter picks (read: guys with really, really good fundamentals who don't measure well), but they've continued to the do the opposite.
Both special teams and depth are going to suffer for that.