“Downgrade.” That was the word I remember being most commonly associated with Sam Darnold and the Seattle Seahawks in March of 2025. I know analysts from both NFL.com and ESPN used the term, and I’m pretty sure a bunch of other people did as well.
And those were just the experts with the guts to put their opinions in writing. I can’t count the number of anonymous whispers I heard about how Seahawks’ general manager John Schneider had made the bonehead play of the year by trusting a flash-in-the-pan like Darnold.
Fortunately for the 12, John Schneider doesn’t listen to anonymous whispers. Or to NFL experts, apart from the ones he employs in his personnel department.
The proper way for Seattle Seahawks fans to view the Rams’ trade for Myles Garrett
So when you read that the Los Angeles Rams just won the Super Bowl by acquiring Myles Garrett, don’t go reaching for the Jim Beam. At least not yet. I’m here to turn that frown upside down.
Jared Verse, the one current player the Rams lost in the deal, is an outstanding young pass rusher. Still, Myles Garrett is a major, major upgrade. Garrett may go down as the greatest pass rusher of all time. He is coming off a record-setting season in which he amassed 23 sacks.
My point here is not that Myles Garrett is somehow not the great player he is touted to be. He clearly is. But history suggests that his best days are behind him.
The NFL did not start keeping official sack totals until 1982. Therefore, you have to be careful when citing historical records. I tend to rely on the good folks at pro-football-reference.com when it comes to this kind of thing. They have compiled “unofficial” sack totals dating back to 1960.
In that time, there have been 96 times in which a player has racked up 16.5 sacks or more in a single season. Garrett, with 23, and Brian Burns, with 16.5, hit the mark last year.
In those 96 instances, nine of them (9.4 percent) were accomplished by players older than 30, which was Garrett’s age at the end of the 2025 season. Plenty of players remained productive past 30. But almost all of them saw a decline in production. Amongst the game’s elite, Michael Starhan may be the only one who actually improved into his 30s.
So the first thing to consider is that Garrett, as great as he is, is not likely to be quite as dominant as he was last season.
Seattle is about as well-equipped to deal with a player like Garrett as any team in the league. Offensive tackles Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas may not be the best tandem in the league – they may not even be the best in the NFC West, where both the Rams and the 49ers boast excellent tackles – but they are very good, young players just entering their primes.
Cross and Lucas will not back down from a player like Garrett.
The thing that would concern me the most in an actual matchup would be if Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula devised schemes to have Garrett line up opposite Anthony Bradford and Jalen Sundell on the inside of the line. But nothing in Garrett’s history – or in Shula’s tenure with the Rams – suggests that is likely.
Myles Garrett has played about 7,000 defensive snaps in his career. Two percent of them have seen him line up inside. Shula’s usage of Verse last season was very similar. He rushed almost exclusively from the outside.
Still, it’s easy to see why this move is being lauded. The Rams' biggest defensive flaw last year was at cornerback. GM Les Snead addressed it in a big way in March by trading for the Chiefs’ Trent McDuffie and signing the Chiefs’ Jaylen Watson.
No one really thought the Rams needed to upgrade their pass rush, but Snead did it anyway. Like Schneider, Snead doesn’t seem to care what outsiders think. Schneider and Snead have won two of the last five Super Bowls with that mindset.
Anyone who watched the NFL last year knew that the Super Bowl may have been played between Seattle and New England, but the championship was determined two weeks earlier when Seattle beat Los Angeles. The Seahawks and the Rams were the two best teams in the NFL by a pretty clear margin.
There’s no guarantee Seattle will be as good this season. But I think Les Snead just announced to the world just how formidable a task it will be to dethrone Mike Macdonald’s men. Trading for Myles Garrett is not an act of desperation. But it is an acknowledgment of just how good Seattle is, even with the “downgrades” most experts have identified this offseason.
That last point, in a very bizarro-world way, may be the best thing about this Garrett trade for Seahawks’ fans. The narrative about the upcoming NFL season is being written with the Seahawks as barely a footnote. Just before the Garrett trade was announced, the football writers at ESPN published an article in which they discussed 100 major stories to follow for the 2026 season.
They talked about MVP candidates, most improved teams, and must-watch games. Guess how many times they mentioned the defending Super Bowl champs?
I counted three times. (There are a few more passing mentions that I'm not counting.) The first came more than halfway into the article when Seattle was listed first on the “least-improved team” list. Then they got a mention because Zach Charbonnet is coming off an injury. The other mention was a statement of fact regarding the number of prime-time games Seattle plays.
Please understand – I’m not saying any of that is untrue. I’m just suggesting it may be a bit tilted toward the negative, and shows undeniable disrespect for a team that no one thought could achieve what they did last year. No JSN in the MVP discussion. No games – even ones against the Rams – in the “must-watch" conversation.
The Rams got mentioned all over the place, and this was before the Myles Garrett trade was announced. So for Seattle fans, here’s the bottom line. Let the league continue to look past the champs. Complacency is always a major issue when a club tries to defend its title. A “nobody respects us” mantra is one of the best countermeasures.
Mike Macdonald should have no trouble revving up his troops in 2026. All he has to do is show them all the experts who have already given the Lombardi Trophy to Myles Garrett and the Rams.
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