Seahawks beef up their draft brain trust with Wolf and Highsmith

Just in time for the NFL Combine, the Seahawks added two solid talent evaluators to their front office; Eliot Wolf and Alonzo Highsmith. Game on!

Seahawks general manager John Schneider has already proven that he’s the wizard of the NFL draft. Well, at least in the late rounds; the first-round picks need some fine-tuning. Seattle took a couple of nice steps toward improving their draft record by hiring a couple of former Browns executives, Eliot Wolf and Alonzo Highsmith. Yes I know, Cleveland has been a dumpster fire for decades. But a large part of their rise to competence – that’s as far as I’ll go – is due to the efforts of these two men.

Schneider has ties with Wolf that go waaaay back to his infancy with the Green Bay Packers. Wolf, the son of former Green Bay GM Ron Wolf, has been tagged as a rising star in the league since he joined the Pacers staff after college in 2004. Wolf worked for Schneider until the wizard joined Pete Carroll in Seattle in 2010. You can see from this piece in 2016, many assumed Wolf was ticketed to eventually be the biggest cheese in the Packers front office.

But sometimes, life happens and regimes change. After the 2017 season, Wolf left for the greener pastures of Cleveland. HE was allegedly in the running to take over as the general manager, but Green Bay went with Brian Gutekunst instead. It may seem hard to believe, but the Browns had finally started doing things right, making them an attractive landing site. After a few false starts, they decided to get some decent personnel people. Hence, the arrival of Wolf and Highsmith.

Wolf became the assistant general manager of the Browns. Or was it assistant to the general manager? It depends on whether he had a bobblehead of himself at his desk. Anyway, Alonzo Highsmith had been with the Packers since 2012. When Wolf headed east, Highsmith joined him, taking the position of Vice President of Player Personnel in Cleveland.

Now, this doesn’t mean they had the final say in the last two drafts for the Browns, but I like what the Browns did over the last two seasons. Corner Greedy Williams was a nice pull in the second round, as was linebacker Mack Wilson in the fifth. Baker Mayfield, Denzel Ward, and Nick Chubb made a pretty nice group in 2018. They nabbed Jamaal Williams and Aaron Jones on Day Three in their last year with the Pack.

I’m not saying either of these guys are geniuses. But they clearly have done more things right than wrong in their careers so far. Adding a pair of personnel minds with their experience is a very good thing for the Seahawks. They’ll be watching the Combine closely, and you can too. It starts this Thursday on the NFL Network. Coverage starts at 1 pm Pacific.