The Seattle Seahawks have climbed the mountain. After a grueling season, where they won 17 games, they have been crowned Super Bowl champions for just the second time in franchise history.

The Seahawks constructed one of the best rosters in football. Defensively, they’re stout on every single level. Offensively, their offensive line sets the tone in the run game, which enables Sam Darnold and Co. to be so efficient through the air. While this is a completely new roster than the one that won it all in 2013, they were built in a very similar way.

Seattle’s GM, John Schneider, became the first GM in NFL history to win two Super Bowls with completely different rosters and coaching staffs, and that’s because he was willing to make a change. They could’ve held onto Russell Wilson when he was seemingly still close to his prime, but he saw the writing on the wall and shipped him to the Denver Broncos for a king’s ransom.

With Seattle’s recent success, you have to ask if this is one of the most lopsided trades of all time.

The Seahawks’ Haul

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In return for Russell Wilson, the Seahawks received three players and five draft picks, including two first-round picks from Denver. The only one of the three players that’s still on the team is Drew Lock, who has served as the backup to Sam Darnold all season, but the real treasure of this haul was the draft picks Seattle received.

The Seahawks added two first-round picks, two second-round picks, and a fifth-round pick for Wilson. They turned those picks into Charles Cross, Boye Mafe, Devon Witherspoon, Derick Hall, and Tyreke Smith. Of those five players, four of them remain on Seattle’s roster, and they all made a massive impact in the Super Bowl.

Cross is the headliner of this group. The Mississippi State product has been Seattle’s starting left tackle for four seasons now, and in 2025, he gave up a career-low two sacks and 24 pressures. He helped the Seahawks form a wall around Sam Darnold all season and was a big reason Darnold was only sacked one time in Super Bowl LX.

Boye Mafe has been a rotational piece on Seattle’s defense this year, but he’s still logged 40 pressures, 36 hurries, and a pair of sacks with 19 run stops, a forced fumble, and a pass breakup. The same goes for Derick Hall, who recorded 41 pressures and three sacks in the regular season, but Hall stepped up in a big way in the Super Bowl, finishing with two sacks and two TFLs.

Then there’s Devon Witherspoon. He missed a lot of time early in the season, but after returning to the field in Week 9, he didn’t give up a single touchdown the rest of the season. In the playoffs, he was great in coverage, not giving up a single touchdown while breaking up four passes, but his biggest impact came as a pass rusher in the Super Bowl, where he logged four pressures on six pass rushes and forced a strip sack, which was returned for a touchdown by Uchenna Nwosu. He also gave up two catches for 16 yards in Super Bowl LX.

Without these foundational pieces, the Seahawks wouldn’t have been able to win the Super Bowl this year. But another aspect of this trade you have to look at is the cap space. Instead of paying Wilson $242.5 million as Denver did, they got his contract off their books and signed Darnold to a deal worth about $33 million per year. That allowed them to go out and get guys like DeMarcus Lawrence and Cooper Kupp in free agency and is a big reason why they have the sixth-most cap space in the league (which is terrifying to think about).

The Seahawks basically got a Super Bowl out of this trade, and while Denver is in a very good spot right now, imagine where they could be without this disastrous trade.

The Russell Wilson Disaster in Denver

All the Broncos got out of the trade with the Seahawks was Russell Wilson and a fourth-round pick, which they used to draft Eyioma Uwazurike. Wilson was coming off a solid season with Seattle, where he threw for 3,113 yards, 25 touchdowns, and six interceptions behind a 64.8 percent completion rate in just 14 games. The Broncos, who were coming off a seven-win season and just hired supposed offensive guru Nathaniel Hackett as head coach, felt they were a quarterback away, but boy, were they wrong.

In his first season with the Broncos, Wilson led them to a 5-12 record while throwing for 3,524 yards, 16 touchdowns, and 11 interceptions while completing just 60.5 percent of his throws. It was such a bad performance that Hackett was fired before the season ended, and Denver then traded for Sean Payton to be their next head coach.

But even Payton could only do so much. In 2023, Wilson threw for 3,070 yards, 26 touchdowns, and eight interceptions, which was much better than the year before, but Denver still posted a losing record and missed the playoffs. Wilson was shipped off to Pittsburgh, and the Broncos drafted Bo Nix, who helped them reach the AFC Championship game this year.

Despite Wilson being off the roster by the start of 2024, Denver is still dealing with the consequences of that trade. They incurred an $85 million dead cap hit and paid him $53 million last year and $32 million this year. He was Denver’s highest-paid player in 2025 despite not being on the team.

Wilson will finally be off the Broncos’ books next season, but can you imagine what Payton could’ve built the last two years if he didn’t have to deal with Wilson’s cap hit? It probably wouldn’t have changed much this year because of Nix’s injury, but they very well could’ve been even better than they were in the regular season, which is scary.

Who knows how the league would’ve changed if it weren’t for this trade? Seattle wouldn’t have landed multiple franchise cornerstones and probably wouldn’t be Super Bowl champions right now. As for Denver, maybe they find their franchise quarterback a few years earlier and make a run at the Super Bowl before 2026.

We’ll never know, but one thing’s for certain: this was one of the most lopsided trades in NFL history.