Pete Carroll says the Seahawks’ trade for Jamal Adams was a rare chance to get an elite player

The Seahawks haven’t had a pick in the top half of the NFL draft since Russell Wilson’s rookie year.

And, they hope, they will keep winning enough so that their draft picks will remain in the bottom half or lower.

Which, in the eyes of coach Pete Carroll, goes a long way toward explaining shy Seattle made the aggressive move it did Saturday to trade two future first-round picks to the New York Jets for All-Pro safety Jamal Adams.

Adams was the sixth overall pick in 2017 out of LSU and has already proven worthy of that billing, being named a first team All-Pro selection last season.

He’s also only 24.

Which, in Carroll’s eyes, made him the kind of player pretty hard for a team in Seattle’s situation to get through the draft.

“It’s so difficult to get a great player on your team, and when you have that opportunity, and you’ve got to take a good look at (it),” Carroll said in an interview Monday on SiriusXM NFL Radio. “(General manager) John Schneider did a fantastic job of following through this process. He and his guys worked all the way throughout to stay involved with this thing so that we would have a chance with really the simple thought — how could we ever get a player of this magnitude on our team?

“We’ve been drafting in the low 20s and the 30s or something forever, and that pick has never allowed us that kind of opportunity. So if we were in the draft and we’re sitting there on draft day and we see a guy up there on the board that we covet and we’ve got to do whatever we can to get him, then what would it take to get up there in the — he was picked sixth or fifth, or whatever the heck it was. He would probably take a No. 1 [draft pick] — and it’d probably take something else. Shoot, we can get this guy to play on our team right now.”

Of course, it took not just one No. 1 pick but two to get Adams, as well as third-rounder and safety Bradley McDougald, with Seattle also getting a fourth-rounder back.

The position of the picks Seattle traded to the Jets will go a long way toward determining the perception of the trade.

Jets general manager Joe Douglas told reporters in New York on Monday what would be expected — that Seattle offered more than anyone else to get Adams, who went on the trade block after falling into a dispute with the team over having his contract extended.

Seattle, Douglas said, was the most “aggressive in their pursuit” of Adams, who will team in Seattle’s back end with Quandre Diggs.

The task now for Seattle is also to eventually sign Adams to a new contract keeping him with the team longer than the two years remaining on his current deal.

But to Carroll, it was a risk worth taking, he said in Monday’s interview.

“Well, first off, our mentality is to always compete,” Carroll said. “We’re competing in every one of these opportunities. So this discussion, this conversation started months ago and it’s just taken a long journey to get to this point. And it took vision and foresight, and really, the guts to hang in there, and really, the courage to make a big move like this. It’s hard for teams to make a big move, but John had — and we were concentrating on this thing, and so he went for it and pulled the trigger, and then we got it done. So it’s been a long time.”

Adams was expected to arrive in Seattle on Monday to take his physical, the last step toward officially becoming a Seahawk, with training camp set to open Tuesday.