I agree that the practice squad is mostly for practice, especially since it has become so difficult for the Seahawks to get any players they can develop past waivers, but they also put a lot of importance on potential, on players who could possibly help them in the future.
Here's an excerpt from Seahawks.com from last fall asking the Seahawks Pro Personnel Director what they look for:
Now that we know who will start the first week of the regular season on the unit that works against the Seahawks’ starters in practice, let’s find out what it is the team looks for when signing a player to the practice squad.
“Basically, one redeeming quality,” Trent Kirchner, the Seahawks’ director of pro personnel, said prior to Saturday’s roster cuts.
“You’re looking for a young guy who’s got anything we can develop. If it’s a cornerback, you’re looking for someone who has really good feet or really good speed. On the line, it’s the size you want in a guard or tackle, but someone who needs to either get stronger or came from a smaller program.
“It’s just anything that stands out.”
While the coaches have spent the summer determining which of the 90 players who began training camp can play of the Seahawks, Kirchner and assistant director of pro personnel Dan Morgan have been looking at other teams during the preseason in an attempt to find someone with “one redeeming quality.”
I can think of only a few current players who were on the practice squad and went on to significant playing time:
Jermaine Kearse
Derrick Coleman
L Jeanpierre
Mike Morgan
Michael Brooks
D'Anthony Smith
Bryan Walters
It would have been a disaster if we had lost Kearse when he was exposed, but we could have lived with losing any of the others.
It's also true that the Seahawks are so good that most of the decent players who don't make the 53-man roster or get put on IR are going to get plucked by other teams. Players that I can think of who were lost in 2013:
Chris Harper
Jaye Howard
Guy Benjamin
John Lotulei
Ron Parker
Sean McGrath
Allen Bradford
Ryan Seymour
Ty Powell
Rishaw Johnson
It broke my heart to lose so much good talent. (I really liked Ty Powell.) it's going to be worse this year because we won the Super Bowl, and we are deeper.
Knowing they are going to lose so many good players, you would think the Hawks could, for example, go for fewer higher quality players instead of going for so many bodies, but I think Carroll knows what he is doing. The exodus doesn't bother him:
“We know that our guys will go onto other teams and play. We know that and we are proud of that, Really, to John’s credit, he called this a long time ago. He said that, ‘There will come a time, we don’t know how many years that it will take, when the roster will be so deep that every cut will be difficult and that every guy that we cut will be picked up by any team.’ And, we are getting close to that. It’s a good thing. It’s just hard and its emotional and all that. So we are treating it with great respect.”
It's hard and it's emotional and for the players who are lost, it's a lot of wasted effort by the coaches and trainers that could have been applied to other players; but overall, Carroll knows that by evaluating so many players he's going to come up with more than his share of diamonds in the rough.
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