The Seattle Seahawks faced a dilemma when they reached their first-round pick, 25th overall, in last week's NFL draft: Take a quarterback to develop or an offensive tackle who could start right now.
They chose the latter, selecting Alabama tackle James Carpenter and leaving TCU quarterback Andy Dalton on the board for the Cincinnati Bengals to grab 10 picks later.
"We debated with Andy Dalton, there's no question about it," Seahawks general manager John Schneider said Wednesday on KIRO-AM. "But I think we all felt like we were at a point in our development where we couldn't pass on a starting tackle right now."
The Seahawks won the NFC West in 2010 despite an offensive line that featured numerous in-season changes brought on by injuries and ineffective play. That need evidently outweighed any uncertainty at quarterback, where only Charlie Whitehurst currently is under contract, although veteran Matt Hasselbeck could return.
"Quite honestly, we'd like to have a guy, especially a rookie (quarterback), be more of a developmental type and a guy more like Aaron Rodgers and sit for a year or two," said Schneider, who added that he believes Dalton could play right away. "So that was really the only point in the draft where there was a guy where we were like, 'There he is, that's a very viable option.' Quite honestly, we just had guys throughout the board that just didn't make sense as we went down comparing them to other positions."
The Seahawks passed on Iowa's Ricky Stanzi, North Carolina's T.J. Yates, Idaho's Nathan Enderle, Virginia Tech's Tyrod Taylor and Alabama's Greg McElroy in later rounds.
"Throughout the rest of the draft, there wasn't another guy staring us right in the face where we're like, 'OK, let's go do it right now, this is our guy' in comparison to the other players at different positions that we went with," Schneider said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
