Hawks to trade down?

KIRKLAND, Wash. – Already facing myriad options in the first round of next weekend’s NFL draft, Seattle Seahawks team president Tim Ruskell added another to the long list Friday morning:

Put off the decision.

Ruskell said the Seahawks are entertaining offers for their first-round pick, No. 25 overall. The team could move down a few spots in the first round and would consider doing the same with their picks in Rounds 2 and 3.

“We would not mind picking up extra picks in this draft,” Ruskell said eight days before the start of the 2008 draft. “We don’t have our fifth (round pick, which was traded for running back Alvin Pearman), and the extra picks have been good to us (over the years); we look at them as gold.

“… A lot of teams have been calling us and saying: ‘Are you willing to move?’ Of course, we say yes.”

Willing to move down, anyway. Ruskell said that trading up in the first round is probably not an option.

“We’re not in a great position to move up this year just because we don’t have many picks,” he said.

The reason the Seahawks are considering the idea of moving down, Ruskell added, is that the team has no glaring need that has to be addressed in Round 1. The Seahawks would like to add more picks in the middle rounds so they can address several different needs.

But the decision of whether to trade down will be contingent on what the Seahawks receive in return.

Trading draft picks is fairly easy to do, thanks to a “draft value chart” that front-office personnel carry with them on draft weekend. The chart assigns a point value to each draft pick, helping to determine what a team can expect in return.

According to a sample chart published on the Web site theredzone.com, the first overall pick is worth 3,000 points. No. 10 would be worth 1,300, No. 16 is worth 1,000, and so on. Third-round picks escalate between 116 and 265 points, while seventh-round picks are all worth less than 15 points each.

According to the chart, the 25th overall pick is worth 720 points. If the Seahawks were to drop down to, say, No. 30, they could probably expect a late third- or early fourth-round pick – if not multiple picks.

The chart makes draft-day movement easier.