John Schneider pushes back on idea Seahawks can't evaluate offensive linemen

The elephant in the room isn't going anywhere, and the Seahawks haven't done much to address it.

Feb 25, 2025; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider speaks during the NFL Scouting Combine at the Indiana Convention Center. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

It seems every free agent offensive lineman the Seattle Seahawks show interest in this year is bound to sign with another team. Yesterday their latest offensive line visitor - Teven Jenkins - wound up signing with the Cleveland Browns. That follows former Minnesota Vikings center Garrett Bradbury going to the New England Patriots and Will Fries going to Minnesota, all of whom could have been genuine upgrades for the Seahawks' starting unit.

The hard truth is at this point it's unlikely that Seattle will be able to significantly upgrade this group by signing veteran free agents. It was a thin class to begin with and the Seahawks have already missed out on the most-impactful potential additions.

General manager John Schneider knows that this is a problem, and has been for some time. However, in his latest appearance on Seattle Sports radio, he pushed back on the idea that the organization can't ID good offensive linemen. Schneider also mentioned that the front office spends more time evaluating OL than any other position. Watch.

John Schneider was asked on @SeattleSports if he’s better at scouting some positions than others in context of not signing many drafted OL to 2nd contracts.

John pushed back on notion they don’t ID talent well but said SEA must be better at assessing/developing their own OL. pic.twitter.com/p3uCosKYAR

— Dugar, Michael-Shawn (@MikeDugar) March 21, 2025

It's true that a few Seahawks linemen have gone on to sign lucrative deals with other teams, including Damien Lewis with Carolina last year. However, it's not accurate to claim that Seattle's castoffs have been in high demand.

With a few rare exceptions such as Russell Okung and Charles Cross (both top 10 overall picks), the team's track record ID'ing, drafting and most importantly developing offensive linemen has been atrocious. That's why we were hoping that Schneider would buck tradition and actually splurge on veterans this year, but it appears that's not going to be in the cards.

There's always a chance that the Seahawks could turn around 15 years of poor scouting and net a few upgrades in the draft, but history says the odds are against it. Realistically, the best improvement that fans can hope for from this unit in 2025 will have to come from within.

Getting what's been an awful group for a long time up to a respectable level will fall to new offensive line coach John Benton. At the very least he has a lot of experience coaching up OL at this level, doing so for seven different NFL teams over the last 22 years. Much will depend on Benton squeezing all the juice he possiby can out of what the Seahawks give him to work with, which probably won't be much.

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