With their 11 picks in the 2025 NFL Draft, the Seattle Seahawks tied for the most rookies selected at the event. Coming off an impressive first season under head coach Mike Macdonald, the Seahawks have a lot of roster changes forthcoming in the offseason.
Despite coming off their best season since 2020, the Seahawks remain committed to retooling their entire roster. After emotionally releasing 10-year veteran Tyler Lockett, Seattle traded its other star wideout, DK Metcalf, to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
While somewhat expected, the moves were still impactful. However, nobody predicted the team would trade Geno Smith to the Las Vegas Raiders. The successive offensive overhaul resulted in the Seahawks signing Sam Darnold, Cooper Kupp and Marquez Valdes-Scantling in free agency.
Needless to say, Macdonald entered OTAs with a lot of reconstructive work ahead of him. Seattle replaced its departing veterans with new ones in free agency, but the front office seemingly remains focused on a youth movement. The Seahawks spent nine of their 11 draft picks on offensive talent, making a clear statement with their incoming rookies.
Regardless of how the offseason unfolds, the Seahawks will be a brand-new team in 2025. However, given the vast landscape of their rookie class, they are clearly determined to have a significant portion of them make an immediate impact.
TE Noah Fant
The Seahawks entered Day Two of the 2025 NFL Draft with three picks and used one of their two second-round selections on Miami tight end Elijah Arroyo. The pick came one year after they took AJ Barner in the fourth round of the 2024 NFL Draft. Considering the potential Barner showed in his limited action as a rookie, veteran Noah Fant now seems like the odd man out.
Fant is coming off a 500-yard campaign in 2024, his most since joining the Seahawks as a part of the Russell Wilson trade in 2022. However, he played just 51.73 percent of the team’s offensive snaps, as opposed to Barner’s 45.55 percent. Fant ceded most of the goal-line work to Barner and Pharaoh Brown, logging just four red zone targets all season and one touchdown.
Despite being the group veteran, Fant enters the offseason in the same position as Barner and Arroyo. With Smith gone, the rapport he developed with him in 2023 goes out the window. Fant is now in a position where he will compete with Arroyo in training camp to be the team’s top pass-catching tight end. Neither Fant nor Arroyo will threaten Barner’s role as the preferred red zone target, leaving them competing for snaps between the 20s.
As the incumbent starter, Fant entered the offseason with the high ground. But with Macdonald slowly taking over the team and deploying “his” guys, his leash is shorter than most. Barner is not going anywhere, and Arroyo is clearly a part of the team’s vision moving forward. Depending on how quickly Arroyo picks up on the offense over the summer, Fant could quickly find himself in no man’s land.
WR Cooper Kupp
When the Seahawks released Lockett and traded Metcalf, the signs clearly pointed to Jaxon Smith-Njigba taking over as the team’s top wideout. He led the team with 1,130 receiving yards in 2024, but still hid in the shadows of Metcalf before the trade. Now, even with Seattle signing Kupp and Marquez Valdes-Scantling, the team’s passing game runs through Smith-Njigba.
Smith-Njigba’s emergence allowed him to take over the slot, forcing Lockett to an unnatural position on the outside. As a career slot receiver, Kupp figures to take Lockett’s old role. But while Kupp has historically been more productive than Lockett, his signing creates some mild confusion. The Seahawks released Lockett partially due to Smith-Njigba’s emergence, only to sign a similar player in Kupp.
The Seahawks tried to play Smith-Njigba on the outside in 2023, resulting in a disappointing rookie campaign. His receiving output nearly doubled in 2024 from the slot. That puts him at odds with Kupp, who is elite in the slot but subpar on the outside. Kupp played nearly 50 percent of his snaps at wideout in 2024, resulting in just 710 receiving yards, his fewest since 2018. Kupp will not return to that role in 2025, with Smith-Njigba being a far more effective player at this point in their careers.
With Macdonald using a fair amount of two-tight end sets, the Seahawks rarely deploy two slot receivers at once. Kupp will likely begin the year on the outside, where his route-running deficiencies are harder to mask. As Seattle transparently builds its offense around Smith-Njigba in 2025, it drafted explosive players like Arrroyo and Tory Horton who better complement his skill set.
Kupp, who turns 32 on June 15, still has a lot of name value. His signing with the Seahawks just made for a questionable situation, given the team’s current direction. With a lot of rookie talent behind him, Kupp might be a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in 2025.
S Coby Bryant
With Julian Love and Coby Bryant manning the Seahawks’ secondary, safety seemed like a position they were settled on entering the 2025 NFL Draft. Yet, with their first pick of Day Two, Seattle spent one of its two defensive picks on South Carolina safety Nick Emmanwori.
After a stellar showing at the NFL Combine, the consensus on Emmanwori had him pegged as an immediate, day-one starter. That made the pick somewhat confusing, but Macdonald, a former defensive coordinator, knows what he sees in Emmanwori. His inclusion sets up an intriguing offseason with both Love and Bryant on high alert.
Love and Bryant had solid seasons in 2024, but the latter seems like the third wheel of the new puzzle. Macdonald loves utilizing two high safeties, making the position a premium on his teams. Love, an elite run-stopper — he received the second-highest run defense grade for a safety on Pro Football Focus in 2024 — is the better tackler of the two. Bryant, a converted cornerback, is the preferred defender in coverage.
Like Bryant, Emmanwori is an elite coverage safety. However, the South Carolina product is a much more defined tackler than Bryant, racking up 88 stops with the Gamecocks in 2024.
Bryant still has high-end reaction skills, timing and recovery that the Seahawks still need in 2025. He is valuable near the line of scrimmage, much better than either Love or Emmanwori is. Even if Bryant loses his job to Emmanwori, he will not fall out of the rotation, as Macdonald likes rotating his players in the secondary. Regardless, with the second-year coach slowly assembling his ideal team, Bryant will have to re-earn his job in the offseason.
