Seahawks have a tradition of mining gems on Draft Day Three

The Seahawks have established a tradition of mining some gems on the final day of the NFL draft. They’ve added more value on that day than you might think.

Since Pete Carroll and John Schneider took the reins of the Seahawks franchise, the team has pulled off some great picks on the final day of the NFL draft. Okay, since our team symbol is a  raptor and not a horse, I guess they took the jesses, not the reins. Carroll and Schneider have a long history of finding true gems for the Seahawks, long after most teams think the mine has played out.

Okay, enough mixed metaphors. Let’s get back to football. Over the ten years these two have been drafting for the Seahawks, Seattle has brought in more talent overall on day 3 than on days one and two combined. There’s a notable exception in one year, and we’ll get to that, I promise.

First, let me explain how I arrived at this conclusion. Clearly, we need some kind of database to compare the value of several drafts full of incredibly different players. Happily, there are several websites that do just that. I used pro-football-reference.com, one of my favorite sources. It’s accurate, fast, has nifty tools, and isn’t loaded with ten thousand popup ads. Let’s check out the Seahawks draft history.

We don’t need to go all the way back to Steve Niehaus, though. As you read the stats across the sheet, I want you to pay attention to the column labeled “CarAV”. This stands for Weighted Career Approximate Value. No, I don’t know why the heading doesn’t start with a “W”. I do know that it provides a very handy way to compare the career value of any NFL player. And that allows us to compare the value of, say, a first-round pick to a seventh-rounder.

So I did just that. Yes, Day Three has a lot more picks, but the real talent should supposedly already have been snapped up in the first three rounds. It’s just a simple bit of mathiness to add the career approximate value of each player to see just how much value the Seahawks pulled from the final day of the draft. So, let’s see how it all played out.