ESPN predicts Seahawks make Super Bowl soon, but not with Sam Darnold

ESPN predicts Seahawks SB trip

"Led by second-year star quarterback LaNorris Sellers along with a top-five defense, the Seahawks will reach the Super Bowl ... but will lose. The days of Smith and Darnold will be ancient history by 2027."

LaNorris Sellers 2024 highlights

We'll give him points for creativity, but this is the NFL take equivalent of pouring a full pound of that exta-spicy green salsa onto your burrito.

While it's fun to imagine Seattle making it back to the Super Bowl so soon, this scenario seems too far-fetched to come to pass. For one thing, in order to land Sellers in the draft the Seahawks will have to totally bomb the upcoming 2025 season.

Even if we assume that Sam Darnold regresses back into the quarterback he was as a rookie wth the Jets, their defense is simply too good for Seattle to finish with a top-10 overall pick in next year's draft. That's likely where Sellers will get drafted. Presuming that Arch Manning is indeed off the board, Sellers would be the third-ranked QB prospect in 2026 - and therefore likely out of range for the Seahawks to pick.

Even if the Sam Darnold gamble turns out to be a total disaster, the Seahawks already have a promising young quarterback who' be next in line to start in Jalen Milroe. Drafting Sanders would mean that Seattle's decision-makers would be so off-put by what they saw from Milroe in what can only be brief action on the field in 2025 that they'd immediately hit the reset button at QB.

That's not going to happen, either. General manager John Schneider has his flaws as an executive, but he's not so impatient as to blow up all of the extensive work he did at quarterback this offseason after just one year.

If the Seahawks are going to make the Super Bowl anytime soon, it'll be because their offensive line is much better than anybody is expecting and Darnold continues on the upward trajectory we saw last season in Minnesota.