The Seahawks have undergone major changes to the coaching staff and the roster in 2018. Seahawks General Manager John Schneider doesn’t regard it as a big deal.
“It’s a constant reset every single year, it doesn’t stop,” Schneider said during an appearance on 710 ESPN in Seattle. “When I say ‘reset’ people are like, ‘Well it’s a rebuild.’ We’re not rebuilding. It’s just a reset. We’ve got some pretty good players on this football team. And there’s a lot of young players that people don’t necessarily -- they haven’t heard their names yet. I remember going through this when we traded Josh Wilson, and Kelly Jennings and Marcus Trufant were here. And nobody knew who Byron Maxwell and Richard Sherman and Walter Thurmond were. . . .
“I’m telling you man, there’s a lot of good young football players that people don’t know about. Tedric Thompson was one of our best special-teams players this last year. He didn’t get to play much at strong safety. Kam [Chancellor] was one of our best special-teams players the first year he played. He didn’t get to play strong safety because Lawyer [Milloy] was here. Trust the process, man.”
Schneider is right. The same process that discovered Chancellor in round six and Sherman in round five and developed them into great players could do the same for Thompson and others who currently aren’t household names among those who dub themselves the 12s.
The difference this time, of course, is that the last time the Seahawks did this, the franchise hadn’t been on the heels of an extended period of stellar performances. This year, the Seahawks are making their most dramatic changes of the Pete Carroll/John Schneider era, in the first offseason after missing the playoffs for the first time since 2011. It’s an experiment that will either work, or it won’t.
Regardless, it had to happen. For a variety of reasons that the Seahawks would freely admit -- and that they would prefer not to discuss. It was time to clear the players who had lingering hostility regarding Super Bowl XLIX off the roster, and it was time to shift the focus of the team away from the Legion of Boom and toward a franchise quarterback who is still in the front end of his prime.
Plenty of players on the Seahawks of past years (and a few who are still on the roster) resent Russell Wilson. As the team moves forward, those guys need to go. They need to be replaced by players who recognize from the moment they enter the locker room that, if the Seahawks are going to thrive for the next decade, Wilson needs to be the centerpiece of the franchise.
So trust the process, Seahawks fans. The team has the most important position covered. All Schneider needs to do is fill in the roster around him and Schneider already has proven he can do just that.