From the moment the trade rumors starting catching fire it seemed unlikely that any team would pony up the cost required to make a trade for Seattle Seahawk’s All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman.
A lofty asking price may have derailed the trade train before it could get moving on the tracks of reality and Seattle general manager John Schneider sounds like a man who realizes a trade may be a long-shot.
Right now, I don’t think the odds (of a trade) are very good,” Schneider said on KIRO-AM in Seattle on Thursday, via ESPN.com. “But if somebody comes cruising along and something happens, and we do something, it happens.”
Schneider said that the team and Sherman have been in constant communication throughout this entire process.
Sherman, 29, is scheduled to count $13 million against the cap for the next two seasons.
“We have constant communication with him. I talked to him this evening,” Schneider said. “So it’s cool. Everything’s fine. I just think that the only reason we would do it is to basically create some cap room and try to become a younger football team. But that’s just one option.”
Schneider also stated that the Sherman-trade exploration was a mutual decision between the Seahawks and Sherman, alluding that no bridges were burned or relationships damaged.
“It’s one of those things where the dialogue we have with our guys is not somebody comes bashing through the door like you would see in a football movie or something like, ‘I demand to be traded!'” Schneider said.
“It’s not like that. It just doesn’t work that way. The way I would answer it is we just have this dialogue with guys all the time, and I think he’d admit that he had a rough year. So he’s looking for maybe a new spark, and he’s either going to find that here in Seattle or he’s going to find it somewhere else. But odds are he’s going to find it here.”
This could all be a form of leveraging on the part of the Seahawks but this trade never seemed likely to being with.
Things can always change, especially as we get closer to the NFL Draft, but a Richard Sherman exodus, via trade, from Seattle seems more steeped in fantasy than reality for now.