With the roster set and Week One creeping closer for the team’s first season in a decade without quarterback Russell Wilson or linebacker Bobby Wagner, Seahawks General Manager John Schneider met with reporters on Wednesday and answered a wide range of questions about the current state of the team.
At one point, he was asked something very simple and clear. What is the plan?
“I think the easiest thing to do is to say, well, who are the stars right?” Schneider said. “I’m not going to mention names but, you know, look at the guys. It’s pretty easy to know who the big-time players are. I think it’s an exciting thing because the fans don’t know what’s coming and who’s going to step forward and I think there’s a bunch of opportunities for guys to step forward.
“When I have things on in the background and I see guys like DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett not mentioned in the NFL top 100 players, it blows my mind. Jordyn Brooks and what he did last year. I was listening to something while I was working and somebody’s talking about, ‘Oh they have nothing on defense’, they got Jamal Adams and that’s it. And I’m thinking to myself what about Quandre Diggs? There’s a lot of fun stuff that we have. Al Woods is an incredible leader.
‘This is the ultimate team sport and I think the cool thing about when you look back on our history in terms of messaging the fans from your 30,000-foot view, there weren’t a lot of people who knew who Richard Sherman was or Kam [Chancellor] or K..J. [Wright] and Bobby [Wagner] for that matter. All those guys. Russ was a third-round pick when Pete [Carroll] decided to start him as a rookie, so these guys come out of nowhere and there’s so many cool opportunities for these guys and the staff. I’ve been really impressed with their level of teaching, education, the time they spend with the guys. It’s important for them to develop people and I’m excited to see where it goes.”
It’s a fair assessment, along with a calculated risk. The team that came out of nowhere in 2012 and won the Super Bowl a year later is now completely gone. A decade later, the best the Seahawks can hope for is to have everyone (including themselves) learn that there are some great, young, no-name players who are ready to step in and step up. Until they do it, they haven’t done it.
Schneider was also asked whether people are sleeping on the Seahawks. He basically admitted that they are.
“I just think we’re chasing instead of being chased which I think is cool,” Schneider said. “I think it’s exciting. It’s kind of like right when we got here, we were chasing the San Francisco 49ers. L.A Rams, like it or not, are the world champions. Let’s go we got to compete with them every single day.”
That spirit of always competing is a throwback to the early days of the Carroll-Schneider regime. They’ve now come full circle. But the fact that it worked a decade ago doesn’t mean it will work now.
So it’s not an issue of people sleeping on the Seahawks. After so many years of the team being a known entity at so many key positions, no one knows what this team has. Especially since it no longer has Russell Wilson -- and that it’s replacing him (for now) with a guy who hasn’t been a regular starter since the last time the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, and who has 34 career touchdown passes against 37 career interceptions.