THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Adams could return the ‘Boom’ to Seahawks’ defense

The question is obvious.

Why would the Seahawks trade all their first-round draft choices of the COVID-19 era (and beyond) for Jets safety Jamal Adams?

OK, I exaggerated.

All they gave up were first-rounders in 2021 and 2022, plus a third-round pick in 2021, and…pause for breath…starting strong safety Bradley McDougald.

Yep, that’s a trainload of potential talent heading toward New York.

So…

Why?

The answer may NOT be so obvious.

Pete Carroll isn’t exactly going senile at age 69, now, but his decision-making might be getting a wee bit clouded by nostalgia.

It’s as simple as this…

Pete looks at Adams — a 6-foot-1, 213-pound bundle of serious violence — and he sees Kam Chancellor.

The coach no doubt recalls that Chancellor was a critical key to the Legion of Boom, his enforcer at strong safety.

Back to the present…

When Carroll and GM John Schneider considered one awful statistic — Seattle was 26th in defensive efficiency against the run a year ago — they went looking for somebody to knock heads.

SINCE KAM has retired…

They scoured the league for the closest thing they could find, and discovered that their target was fighting with the Jets’ hierarchy.

Adams was on a mission to get out of New York.

There’s no question that Adams, already an Pro Bowl talent at age 24, is a weapon with the skills and attitude to be deployed almost anywhere.

He can even rush the passer (6 1/2 sacks last year), which is a serious need in Seattle.

But the price?

Two firsts and a third (with a fourth-rounder coming this way), plus McDougald — an awfully decent player himself?

Here’s the thing: I suspect Carroll and Schneider considered their investment in Russell Wilson, along with his age (31), and decided that they had to fix the damn defense or accept that 11 wins and maybe one playoff win was as far as this team could go.

Would you dare waste Wilson’s window of opportunity like that?

Consider this amazing snippet from The Athletic’s overview of the Seahawks…

“Perhaps the most impressive stat of the Carroll/Wilson era is that they’ve held a lead or been within one possession in the fourth quarter in 138 of 143 games together (postseason included).

“They’re pretty much always competitive. The Seahawks have won 50 regular-season games over the past five seasons — tied for the fifth most in the NFL.

“Yet during that span, they’ve failed to advance past the postseason divisional round.”

BY NOW, it’s just a fact of our football life that almost all Seahawks games — as those stats prove — come down to Wilson trying to win, tie or send a game into overtime late in the fourth quarter.

That brings up an issue so obvious that you don’t even need to be Pete Carroll to scream this toward the sky.

Why can’t this team perform better on both sides of the ball for the FIRST three quarters, perhaps allowing Wilson the luxury of not having to risk his life on the last two possessions?

We know about the offensive side of things.

Pete wants to run the ball more than Woody Hayes did it at Ohio State.

Only four teams threw the ball less on first and second downs last season than Seattle.

It’s not an awful game plan, except that you have Wilson — oh, and that league-worst number of fumbles, more of which were returned for TDs than suffered by any other team.

Hey, though, not today…

We can peer at the offense, and Pete’s six or seven tight ends, some other time.

BUT FOR now, our discussion should concern getting some stops and creating more turnovers — so that the defense is actually chipping in with some help.

We knew that Carroll and defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. wanted more pure athletes making plays on defense.

They’ve already said that versatile big hitter Marquise Blair will see a lot more snaps at safety, nickel and elsewhere — and that they intend to use No. 1 draft choice Jordyn Brooks (nominally a linebacker) all over the place because of his size and speed.

Seriously, now, doesn’t the addition of Jamal Adams make sense when you see where all this is going?

It does.

Whether he’ll be worth giving away everything but the Space Needle, well…

Let’s tee it up and find out.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments, Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.

Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball, once per month during the offseason.