John Schneider and Pete Carroll hold Pre-draft press conference

On Monday Seattle Seahawks general manager John Schneider and head coach Pete Carroll held their pre-draft press conference, in which they addressed several issues regarding the team and the strategy heading into the draft this week. There were several takeaways from the press conference that will intrigue fans, including how they are evaluating players, updates on Kam Chancellor and Malik McDowell and whether the Seahawks are continuing down the road of possibly adding Colin Kaepernick to the roster.

The biggest, and most interesting takeaway, was simply that the team is narrowing down its draft board this year. In particular, Schneider stated that they have trimmed the draft board down slimmer than they have in the past few years. In particular, it was stated during the press conference that in recent seasons they have made excuses for some guys based on scouts having spent 10-11 months of the year on the road scouting players, but for 2018 they are going back to the criteria they used in the 2010-2012 timeframe.

Perhaps getting back to the criteria they used in those drafts will help return the team to the levels of success they had drafting in those years, because the drafts in the years since have been rather lean.

In any case, regardless of how large the team’s draft board is, the Seahawks shed some light on what is going on with strong safety Kam Chancellor. According to Schneider, Chancellor has “a scan” scheduled to be performed on his neck in either late June or early July that will give more information on Chancellor’s ability to be physically cleared to play.

Early July would be eight months since November when Chancellor was originally injured in the Week 10 Thursday Night Football game against the Arizona Cardinals, which would not be out of line with the expected timeframe for recovery from a nerve injury in the neck. Obviously we have no indication about the specific nature of Chancellor’s injury, and with Chancellor’s 2018 salary already being fully guaranteed, it may be irrelevant.

In addition to not having anything new to report on Chancellor, Carroll also stated that they don’t have any update on Malik McDowell, who is unable to take part in anything.

So, no new news on Chancellor or McDowell, but they did not shut the door on adding Kaepernick.

So, there’s a ton of potential news for the Seahawks this week between the draft, the possibility of an Earl Thomas trade and the madhouse of the undrafted free agent signing period, so stay tuned to Field Gulls as we do our best to keep readers updated.

For those who would like to watch the full video of the press conference, it can be found here:

https://www.seahawks.com/video/john-schneider-pete-carroll-pre-draft-press-conference

Enjoy!