Seattle Seahawks: Revisiting the botched 2016 NFL Draft

While a great deal of focus has been placed on how the Seattle Seahawks can improve, the 2016 NFL Draft was full of missed opportunities.

In 2016, the Seattle Seahawks finished the regular season 10-5-1, stomped on their Wild Card Round opponent, and then lost to the eventual NFC Champions, the Atlanta Falcons. It was a fairly successful season, but it was also the final year the Seahawks made the playoffs with the Legion of Boom defense.

Given how many players left the team from that playoff loss through the 2018 season, a good draft haul in 2016 would have really helped set the team up for the future. Instead, most of the team’s draft selections fell flat.

Looking back at the 2016 NFL Draft, we’ll be going round by round and breaking down the successes and failures of every selection Seattle made in 2016. Only one or two players from the 10-man class actually made a measurable difference during the season, something to remember heading into the 2019 NFL Draft in April.

With that, we start with the first round.

First Round: Germain Ifedi

Germain Ifedi was taken with the 31st overall pick out of Texas A&M. He was not very polished coming out of college, but Seattle wanted to finally start fixing their offensive line. Even at this point, the line had been in tatters for years and the team snuck by mostly thanks to Russell Wilson‘s agility and, before he retired, Marshawn Lynch‘s hard running style.

But Lynch was injured for most of 2015 and ended up retiring. With Thomas Rawls as the only rushing threat on the roster, Seattle felt the need to address the line and solidify the base of the offense. The offensive line coach, Tom Cable, was optimistic about Ifedi’s future with the team.

On the bright side, Ifedi is still with the team. Depending on your viewpoint, that might be a bad thing, though. While Ifedi did end up starting 13 games as a rookie, he’s been completely inconsistent and has shown no sign of future progression. He played right tackle in 2018 and was scorched through the first two weeks of the season. Von Miller and Khalil Mack terrorized Ifedi. Miller actually recorded three sacks when he faced off against Ifedi in Week 1.

By the end of the 2018 season, Wilson had been sacked a career-high 51 times. While the run game has returned, drafting Ifedi hasn’t helped out the Seahawks quarterback in the least. The team should decline the right tackle’s fifth-year option and let him walk into free agency after the 2019 season.