The Seahawks have missed the playoffs in three of the past four years and now have the fourth-longest drought from the NFC title game (12 teams have made it since they did in 2014), so fans and media have started to point the finger at John Schneider.

After a particularly bad 2024 in which the general manager missed on most of his free agents and put together the Seahawks’ worst offensive line since 2016, many are calling for his job.

But let’s be very clear: Jody Allen is not going to fire Schneider. Not when Mike Macdonald, the coach he just hired, led the Hawks to 10 wins in his first season by turning around a defense that had wallowed in the NFL’s depths in Pete Carroll’s last few seasons.

While Schneider has taken a lot of heat locally, his reputation around the league is still sterling. Early in the 2024 season, The Athletic released a ranking of the top 10 front offices in the NFL, and Schneider (and his Seahawks crew) came in seventh in voting from 40 NFL executives and coaches.

They see him as top-10 GM because he has only three losing seasons in 15, has created a stable winning franchise and has a lot of good relationships around the league.

The survey put the following six teams ahead of Seattle: Baltimore, Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit and Green Bay. The Rams, Buffalo and Pittsburgh rounded out the top 10, although the Rams and Buffalo certainly have been better than Seattle at team building over the past seven years.

We’d put Schneider maybe 11^th to 13^th in the league now, with Tampa’s Jason Licht and Minnesota’s Kwesi Adofo-Mensah both ranking ahead and Pittsburgh and Miami in the same zone. If you think 11^th is too high, take a look around at all the dysfunctional teams in the NFL. A dozen teams lost double-digit games in 2024, and six of those are on to new coaches – Mark Davis’ directionless Raiders and the Brady-less Patriots for the second straight year.

We’ve had strong critiques about Schneider’s team-building process for years now, ever since he squandered strong draft capital with some terrible picks in 2016 and 2017. So the “Fire Schneider” crowd that has suddenly risen up is late to the party.

Schneider has definite weaknesses as a GM. We have recited many of them in previous posts over the past seven years or so. He usually is frugal in all the wrong ways in free agency. He typically fails when he has to draft in the bottom half of the first round. Despite allocating plenty of draft picks to his offensive line, he and the Hawks are not good at developing or keeping them.

The O-line has been Schneider’s biggest Achilles’ heel in his 15 years as Seattle’s GM, and fans are understandably tired of it. They were especially irked last offseason when he talked about how interior offensive linemen are overpaid and overdrafted — and then he showed how serious he was by fielding an underpaid and underdrafted interior line that ruined any shot at a consistent offense.

The reason the Hawks won 10 games is that Schneider tends to cover his deficiencies by making savvy veteran trades.

In fact, this team is poised to take a big jump in 2025 largely because Schneider had the gumption to trade Russell Wilson in 2022 (he would have done it in 2021, too, if Carroll had let him). The Wilson blockbuster netted four core draft picks: OT Charles Cross, OLB Boye Mafe, CB Devon Witherspoon and OLB Derick Hall.

Schneider made another stellar veteran trade by acquiring Leonard Williams in 2023. He then extended both Williams and free-agent pickup Julian Love last year and also acquired Ernest Jones IV, who is likely to sign an extension that keeps him as part of the core as well.

Schneider also went big in 2023 free agency, giving Dre Jones the largest contract the Seahawks had ever offered an outside free agent. It was a big swing by Schneider in an attempt to fortify a really weak defensive line at the time – even if it has not worked out as much as we all hoped it would.

All in all, Schneider has set up Macdonald with a pretty talented defensive core. The 2025 group will be led by Williams, Love, Witherspoon, Mafe and Hall – plus 2024 first-rounder Byron Murphy II and Uchenna Nwosu — an excellent signing in 2022 who has had bad injury luck the past two seasons. Mid-round picks Coby Bryant, Riq Woolen and Tyrice Knight are solid role players in this defense (although we would try to capitalize on Woolen’s value and trade him).

Schneider has loaded up on some skill players over the past few drafts as well: Ken Walker in 2022, Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Zach Charbonnet in 2023.

Geno Smith has been a mostly capable replacement for Wilson, although the Hawks have made the playoffs just once in his three starting seasons and the future of the QB spot is still a major question.

Assuming Smith is back, we won’t know whether he can win playoff games until Schneider upgrades the offensive line and Seattle has an offensive coordinator who takes the pressure off the QB with a capable running attack.

The Hawks won 10 games in 2024 with a bad line and overmatched offensive coordinator. If they fix those spots, they can win playoff games in 2025.

But Schneider is not going anywhere, so fans just have to hope he has a much better year of team building in 2025 than he had in 2024.