The Jamal Adams Trade

How worried should we be? [Rich Barnes - USA Today]

While this isn’t specifically Niners news, I felt I should chime in since the Seahawks are our top rival, we were in on trade discussions with Adams, and now we’ll have to see him twice a year.

But I’ll try and make it (relatively) quick.

The Trade

Jets receive: SS Bradley McDougald, 2021 first-round pick, 2022 first-round pick, 2021 third-round pick

Seahawks receive: SS Jamal Adams, 2022 fourth-round pick

In short, it’s a bummer that Jamal Adams—the best box safety in the game and one of, if not the single best safeties period—is now with our division rivals. The combination of the underrated Quandre Diggs, the probably slightly overrated Shaquill Griffin, and now Adams makes for a formidable secondary and quickly shores up what was a major weak spot for Seattle as recently as the beginning of last season. Adams is a superstar player, and he clearly makes the Seahawks better.

That being said, I have major questions about what they gave up.

Pick haul

Losing two first-rounders (and change) is always a tough sell—and probably more so when the NFL is facing at least one year of a diminished salary cap—but the Seahawks likely made this move because they feel they’re one player away from Super Bowl contention. While a +7 point differential last season, the loss of their only good pass rusher from an already weak front, and an unrepeatable 10-2 record in close games—a giant statistical outlier helped in part by opponents missing would-be game-winning field goals to end at least two divisional contests—makes me doubt their elite status, the Seahawks clearly believe the first-round picks they gave up will be deep in the twenties. Now will the three picks they lost net a single player of Adams’ caliber? Unlikely, especially given the Seahawks haven’t selected a single first-round pick who could even be considered decent since 2012, but this isn’t the NBA where you should always flip a handful of good players for one great one. Depth matters more and you need at least 4x as many regular contributors in the NFL, the Seahawks had much bigger areas of need (OL and DL) that they now have fewer means to address, and early round draft incompetence is no excuse for devaluing high picks; believing so would be the literal equivalence of thinking two wrongs make a right. 

And we haven’t even gotten to the money yet.

Salary

Jamal Adams will play out the cheap fourth year of his rookie contract this season before demanding a long-term extension that will almost certainly have to reset the safety market. He left the Jets in part because they were dragging their feet on a long-term deal and made it public that he’d be willing to play out the 2020 season on his current contract with the right squad but that an extension would need to come next summer. With the top four safeties currently making $14M or more and Earl Thomas right on their heels, the baseline average annual salary that we should expect him to make following this season is at least $15M/year. As a super conservative estimate, let’s say he signs an extension of 4 years at $60M. Meanwhile, the two first-rounders the Seahawks gave up (at ~$12M/yr in the mid-twenties) and the third-rounder (at $4.5-5M/year) will combine to make around $29M over the same time span. So you’re paying literally twice as much for one player over three. And while you could make an argument for that at certain positions, it’s hard to make that argument for this position in this scheme. 

Positional value within scheme

The Seahawks run the same base scheme as we do, and—like us—shifted more towards quarters coverage last year as they dealt with life after Earl Thomas. While some might think that means Adams will slide into Thomas’ vacated single-high role and Seattle can re-animate the corpse of the Legion of Boom, that would be quite a stretch. Adams, while great, has spent his entire career lined up in the box, where he is unquestionably at his best and most disruptive. In fact, he actually tallied more snaps lining up at linebacker or defensive end than he has at safety since entering the league, and if you look at where he’s lined up over that time, I feel pretty comfortable saying he won’t be playing centerfield for the Hawks. 

Jamal Adams's heat map from 2019 pic.twitter.com/LREY0z3XFo

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) July 25, 2020

Every offensive and defensive scheme prioritizes which positions are worthy of top-dollar pay. For the Chiefs (Mathieu), Ravens (Earl Thomas), Patriots (Devin McCourty and Patrick Chung), and Vikings (Harrison Smith and Anthony Harris), it makes more sense for them to pay their safeties well because they’re asked to do roles that are either much harder to accomplish (single-high safety) or require a varied Swiss Army knife skillset. I actually love the movement towards safeties as the defensive equivalent of versatile chess piece—playing in the box, running the alley, locking up slot receivers, or sitting back in coverage—but that’s not what we or the Seahawks do; thus it doesn’t make sense to pay top dollar for the position.

Role / Scheme Changes?

Adams can play the Kam Chancellor role and do it better than Chancellor ever did (at least now that you can’t murder people over the middle), and while he could also perform well as a two-high safety, he—similar to Matthieu— is still at his best closer to the line of scrimmage. So perhaps the Seahawks have aspirations for him grander than a strong safety?

As the league shifts towards hybrids, it’s not hard to see Adams playing more linebacker on passing downs, setting the edge against the stretch runs of the Niners and Rams, spying Kyler Murray, and being used to man up in the slot against the George Kittles of the world. Or perhaps he’s a hybrid Will LB/nickel corner, bouncing in and out of the box but always staying near the line of scrimmage? Adams is also one of the league’s best pass rushers amongst DBs so he could help off the edge, but that’s still amongst DBs and would require a pretty significant change to the Seahawks’ scheme in order to tap into.

Seattle has drafted four safeties in the past three years (plus two safety/corner types who wound up playing on the boundary); this includes spending last year’s second-round pick on Marquis Blair. They have the numbers to run a lot of three safety packages and keep Adams near the line of scrimmage where he rarely—if ever—has to play deep (similar, again, to the Chiefs and Mathieu). 

But how much are the Seahawks willing to adapt their scheme to maximize Adams’ skills? I’m sure to some extent. Carroll is a top notch DB coach and whenever you add a star player—and Adams is exactly that—you adapt to what they bring to the table. But the safety-reliant schemes that the Chiefs, Ravens, and Patriots employ all heavily lean towards man coverage, and it’s difficult to see the Seahawks going that far away from the core defensive principles that Carroll has specialized in since arriving in Seattle. They’re still the second-winningest team in the league since Russell Wilson showed up, and if there’s anything Carroll has shown with his commitment to ineffectively running the ball out of pro sets, it’s that he believes in his schemes, regardless of what direction the league may be going.

If I’m just totally guessing right now (which I am), I’d say Adams plays the Kam Chancellor role in base packages, setting the edge against the run, working shallow underneath coverages, and mirroring Kittle-like people, while he bounces between Will linebacker and big nickel in sub packages, where he can be utilized off the edge as a pass rusher, can help offset the coverage limitations that have started showing a bit with Bobby Wagner, and can keep Seattle from being outmatched based on personnel sets alone.

Future Team-Building Power

While Griffin and Adams will need long-term extensions next year, the rest of their 2021 free agents are take-it-or-leave-it types, and the Seahawks will be in relatively good spending position regardless of where the Corona cap lies. But—as stated above—I think they’re a much less complete team than they do, so they’ll likely need that money. 

Their OL, which was already meh, is replacing two starters with unproven commodities and is being projected by PFF as the 28th-rated unit going into 2020. Their pass rush, ranked 30th last year, just lost Jadeveon Clowney while LJ Collier—his heir apparent, but realistically the dude they’re hoping is their next Frank Clark—will need to play much better as a sophomore after registering just 3 total tackles in 11 games of part-time duty last year. While these holes could theoretically be filled via second-day picks (where the Seahawks have often excelled), losing two firsts greatly diminishes their drafting power and the capital they need to move around as much as they typically like to. Compound that with the fact that offensive line and pass rush are two of the highest-demand and highest-drafted positions, and they may have to dip into free agency to patch their roster holes. 

The problem with that strategy is that paying for top-tier players in free agency often means overpaying, and offensive line and pass rush are notoriously the most expensive free agent acquisitions to begin with. Any valuation bump in the draft is reflected in free agency tenfold and by giving up your two most valuable future picks while expending big money on a position that your own scheme doesn’t necessarily prioritize, the Seahawks have made their future fixes along the OL and DL more expensive and thus—due to cost and a greater squeeze on the salary cap with Adams’ eventual extension—inherently riskier. In the Seahawks’ nightmare scenario, the trade and extension for Adams will push them to reach for both a new tackle and a new edge rusher, and they’ll find themselves paying top-dollar for a great safety while greatly overpaying two average-or-worse performers at crucial positions; it could result in an expensive snowball.

Perhaps they’ll get it right, finding help on the second-day of the draft or with buy-low prospects in free agency. Or perhaps they’ll continue to stop-gap the tackle position—letting Russell Wilson run for his life—while Collier lives up to his first-round selection. But as always, giving up draft picks means giving up rounds in the chamber. With this trade for Adams, the Hawks are really banking on the idea that they won’t miss.

Conclusion

Adams is a great player, but while the Chiefs’ high-priced acquisition of Tyrann Mathieu made sense for them, they were transitioning to a scheme that required a hybrid player of his talents, and—even more importantly—they got him in free agency. They gave up nothing. Meanwhile, the Seahawks traded two first-round picks, a third, and a starting safety, a bounty that is hard to justify for anyone other than a quarterback. It’s probably not a great sign that—other than the Khalil Mack trade, which you can at least justify—the other three trades of a similar scope were by the Rams—who no one should be taking cap management and big-deal transaction advice from—the Dave Gettleman Giants and Bill O’Brien. 

So have the Seahawks improved through this trade? Absolutely. Adams is too durable and too strong of a locker room presence for this trade to blow-up in their faces like the Percy Harvin deal; he’s too young and good of a player to underwhelm in a new setting like Jimmy Graham did. Adams gives them one of the best secondaries in the league, and I don’t look forward to seeing him twice a year. But have the Seahawks improved enough through this trade to offset the future team-building power they gave up? Unlikely.