Fast Facts: The Seahawks 2012 draft class played a ton

So far this week I’ve looked at how much playing time the members of each of the last few draft classes for the Seattle Seahawks logged with the team. So far I’ve looked at

• The 2016 class with Germain Ifedi and Jarran Reed leading the way,
• The 2015 draft class led by Frank Clark and Tyler Lockett,
• The 2014 class which produced Justin Britt and Paul Richardson and
• The 2013 class which had Luke Willson and a bunch of guys who never saw the field.

That leaves today’s installment as the 2012 class. As much as I’d love to do this for all of the Hawks’ draft classes under Pete Carroll and John Schneider, the NFL only started publishing official snap count data during 2012, so this is as far back as I will be able to go.

In any case, before I jump into the numbers, I want to make a remark following a couple of comments in the articles from the last couple of days. Namely, the fact that this is a part of the new Fast Facts series. What I am looking to accomplish when I author one of the Fast Fact pieces is to simply present something which is factual. These pieces are not meant to be analytical in nature, and are designed to simply present data, largely without comment.

Now that doesn’t mean that I won’t put some of those facts into perspective by comparing them to other facts, like I did in laying out how little the 2013 draft class played relative to other classes. However, the goal of the numbers the articles this week is not to determine how successful each of the recent Seattle draft classes have been, it’s simply to look at how much playing time the team has gotten out of each class, and nothing more.

So, here are the numbers for the 2012 draft class.

In short, the 2012 class is the exact opposite of the 2013 class. Even the players who didn’t catch on in Seattle had multi-year careers elsewhere. Jay Howard spent four years with the Kansas City Chiefs, Korey Toomer is a special teamer and rotational depth for the Green Bay Packers, Greg Scruggs played four years in the NFL between the Seahawks and Chicago Bears and even Winston Guy lasted four seasons in the league.

As I did with the other draft classes, I only counted snaps in a player’s initial period of time with the team. Thus, the snaps that J.R. Sweezy has logged this season after returning from his fleecing of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not included. In spite of leaving those snaps out, this draft class has combined for 20,843 offensive and defensive snaps played for the Seahawks. Just for comparative purposes, the 38 players the Hawks selected in the 2013-2016 drafts have combined to play 21,636 snaps for the team heading into the game Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers.