NorthHawk wrote:Yah, 2012 was an insanely good draft - actually 2010 - 2012 was an exceptional streak of talent acquisition.
After that things fell off a cliff.
That's a fact, Jack. And for you cherry picking aficionados, for the 3 seasons from 2010-2012, our draft picks included the following players and their overall selection:
Russell Okung (#6), Earl Thomas (#14), Kam Chancellor (#133), KJ Wright (#99), Richard Sherman (#154), Bobby Wagner (#47), and Russell Wilson (#75). 6 of those 7 players were Pro Bowlers within the first 3 years that they were drafted, the exception being KJ.
The next 9 seasons, from 2013-21, we have selected just 4 Pro Bowlers: Tyler Lockett (#69), Frank Clark (#63), Michael Dickson (#149), and DK Metcalf (64). And if we really wanted to get picky, we should scratch Dickson as he's a specialist, making it just 3 Pro Bowl position players, and Clark didn't make it to the Pro Bowl until after he had been traded to Kansas City, dropping down to just two that performed to Pro Bowl standards as a position player for the Hawks. None of the 7 Pro Bowl players drafted in the first three years are tagged with those qualifiers.
Obviously, the jury is still out on some of those later selections (Brooks, Lewis, and Taylor for example), but nevertheless, the difference is so dramatic that one or two current players subsequently making a Pro Bowl isn't going to make much of a difference.
You can make some excuses, such as our first draft we had two selections in the top 15 (Okung and Thomas) and that in subsequent drafts, we traded away a number of our top picks or traded down to accumulate more, lower round picks. But the inescapable fact is that for whatever reason, our drafting has lagged in recent years compared to what it was in the first three seasons, at least when measured by Pro Bowl appearances.