One comment Seattle Seahawks general manager and president of football operations John Schneider made in 2024 caught a good amount of attention online.
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Speaking last March during the second season of Seattle Sports’ John Schneider Show, he described the offensive guard position as one that is commonly “over-drafted” and “overpaid.”
Some have taken that to mean the Seahawks don’t value guard, a position where they haven’t traditionally been strong in recent years, as highly as others in the NFL.
On Thursday, Seattle Sports’ Bob Stelton brought that comment back up to Schneider, who clarified that his point wasn’t that the position itself is overvalued, but instead concerns how the ever-present need of guards in the football world outweighs the talent pool.
“I would say the statement, I guess, it’s not a level of importance – it’s extremely important, it’s highly valued,” Schneider said Thursday. “But we still to this day, because of the dearth of talent at the position, will overpay at that position and will over-draft at that position.”
In a sense, overpaying and over-drafting at guard seems to be the price of doing business in the NFL.
“We’ve been guilty of it, and we probably will be guilty of it in the future as well,” Schneider continued. “It’s just based on a level of talent. It’s a position that everybody is looking for, right?”
Schneider went on to say that the issue was on full display in the Super Bowl earlier this month when the Philadelphia Eagles blew out the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22, and said it extends to the college game – something he is in tune with especially this time of year while scouting for April’s NFL Draft.
“We talked (last week) about the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, what happened there, that was a rough go for those guys. I would say there’s probably about two or three teams that have really good offensive lines. I’m talking college football, pro football, everything.”
The lack of guard talent leads to some tough decisions in the offseason.
“The philosophy is not like we’re not going to overpay (guards). We probably will because we have to, right?” Schneider said. “But you have to be smart with those decisions. So are we gonna overpay a guard and lose out on a defensive tackle? No, we’d rather pay the player that we think is a better talent. It’s kind of like drafting for need in the draft.
“… It’s just like we talked about supply and demand. It’s never like it’s not important or (that) we have this philosophy (that we don’t value guards).”
Schneider, who started as a scout in the early 1990s with the Green Bay Packers and has been Seahawks GM since 2010, said he has come across people in his career who don’t value the guard position. But that’s not the Seahawks’ stance.
“I worked with somebody that used to say ‘a guard is a guard is a guard, and you don’t pay them.’ I did work with somebody like that in my past, but that’s not the case with us,” he said. “It’s really like, OK, we have to put a value on people at the end of the day … We’ll see it this weekend too when we go down to the (NFL Scouting) Combine. … A guy might be a solid backup in our eyes, but he’s going to get paid like a difference-maker, which is two grades up.”
