Seahawks' Brain Trust Bracing for 'Unique' Virtual NFL Draft

Transforming their homes into temporary war rooms, Pete Carroll and John Schneider are preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime experience drafting virtually and per usual, they're going to come out swinging and ready to compete.

Since arriving in a package deal back in 2010, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider have conducted 10 drafts together. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, their 11th will be dramatically different than the ones that preceded it with the entire world locked up at home in quarantine.

Rather than teaming up with the rest of Seattle's coaching staff and scouting department at the team facility, Carroll, Schneider, and all of the other important players in the team's draft decisions will be working remotely. In their own personal war rooms, they'll rely on Zoom conferences, text messages, e-mails, and maybe carrier pigeons to ensure business gets done in a timely manner.

"It's definitely been a challenge, but everybody's done a great job of recreating my dining room into a - when you walk in the door, it's the draft room," Schneider commented. "I'm a very visual person, so everything's there in case things fall apart from a technology standpoint. I think there's like, I don't know, it feels like 25 screens. But I like the one-on-one interaction. I like being able to have private conversations with Pete throughout the draft process."

With this week's draft going virtual, NFL teams such as the Seahawks have had to go to great lengths to ensure coaches, executives, and scouts have an adequate setup to handle the amount of bandwidth typically available at team facilities.

In Schneider's case, he admitted the location of his home wasn't ideal for a fast internet and he "ripped up some walls" to make sure technology functioned properly on Thursday through Saturday. Playing the optimist role per usual, Carroll excitedly seemed far more comfortable with his personal war room, though he's keeping fingers crossed their aren't any technical glitches that disrupt the process.

"I've got boards that wrap around the room. I've got seven screens going," Carroll said, admitting he likes all of the activity. "We've got our land lines. We have got our cell phones, our backup cell phones, all kinds of stuff… It's kind of cool. It's all high-tech. We have our own little room here to do our press conference thing that's set off to the side, as well."

"We just both hope that we don't get overloads on the circuits and everything shuts down, you know, because we've got a lot more things plugged in than we normally do around here."

Preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime draft event, the NFL conducted a practice mock draft on Monday and Schneider made a miscue right off the bat by forgetting to unmute himself during roll call. But after a rough start, he felt the simulation went "very smoothly," though he's still not fully comfortable with conducting negotiations for trades.

To ease those concerns, the Seahawks plan to conduct a second simulation with other teams that isn't scripted and provides a more authentic feel for how making a trade will look with everyone in separate locations.

"At this point, I would say I'm about 80 percent there," Schneider said. "We're going to practice with a couple teams tomorrow in a live version on the clock and be negotiating... The negotiation part of it is something that we're going to still work on some more, so honestly, to say that I'm totally comfortable with it right now, I'm not. By tomorrow night, I will be."

Leading up to the draft, Carroll, Schneider, and Seattle's scouting department have had to be creative finishing up evaluations for prospects. Due to the coronavirus, the NFL put travel restrictions in place in early March that wiped out most pro days and prevented players from visiting with teams at their facility. Instead, teams have been forced to communicate with prospects in alternative methods such as Skype and Zoom.

Reflecting on the process, Schneider thinks the virtual visits will have some carryover into the future when things return to normal due to the ease of establishing relationships with prospects.

"I don't necessarily think it's the film study," Schneider said when asked about how current circumstances could impact player evaluation in the future. "I think it's the interpersonal skills, being able to - like we said earlier - pick up your phone and Skype somebody instead of just texting... Just being able to talk to them on the phone, that interaction and how quickly they respond to our scouts."

As Schneider discussed, these virtual conversations can be just as revealing about a player as on-site meetings.

"We had one guy wearing a tie. We had another guy laying in bed watching TV. So you know, you can learn a lot."

Those assessments will be especially critical heading into a season clouded by uncertainty. Offseason programs were supposed to kick off next week for the Seahawks, but stay-at-home restrictions have led to the postponement of on-field activities, which have been replaced by voluntary virtual offseason programs.

"Hopefully we are going to draft guys and pick up guys in free agency that can adapt quickly," Carroll remarked. "They are going to going to have to be able to make sense of stuff in a lot shorter time frame. They are going to have to process really well. They are going to have to have their mind and act together so they can put their best foot forward and all that."

"There's a lot of this that's going to be unique, and we don't know what the runway time is going to be once we get them. We won't know how much time we will have to prepare them."

As they do with everything else running their football operations, whether they're trying to finish off a draft day trade with the clock melting away or outlining workout programs for players to do from their homes, Carroll and Schneider aren't going to make excuses. Banking on their experiences working together over the past decade and their strong relationships with other coaches and scouts helping them succeed amid uncertain times, they intend to do things better than anyone else.

"This really is a competition and we are up against trying to figure this thing out," Carroll said. "We are battling and competing like always and going to try to make it come out really in a special way."