RENTON — Those who were there at the beginning of the greatest run of success in Seahawks history look at the team now and experience a sense of déjà vu.
“I will say right now it feels very similar to 2011,” former receiver Doug Baldwin said recently. “I feel like they are building the foundation for what’s to come and I think they are going to surprise a few folks this year. And next year it will be surprising, too.”
Former defensive end Michael Bennett, who with Baldwin was part of Seattle’s Super Bowl teams in 2013 and 2014, echoed a similar thought.
“You look at Seattle and that’s how it started,” Bennett said. “I think coach [Pete] Carroll is thinking, ‘We can start over and make that happen again.’”
The sentiments of Baldwin and Bennett are shared by most of the football world, who view the team as back at square one following the cataclysmic events of March 8 when the Seahawks traded quarterback Russell Wilson to Denver and released middle linebacker Bobby Wagner — the only two players left from the team that won the Super Bowl following the 2013 season.
They were moves made in the wake of a 7-10 season, the first losing record for Seattle since 2011 and a year that gave all the appearance of a glorious run having reached its end.
Two people who don’t seem to see it that way, though, are the two in charge of trying to make the next great run happen — Carroll and general manager John Schneider.
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On the day the Wilson trade was announced, and at every turn since, the two have resisted that the Seahawks are doing that dreaded “R” word — rebuilding.
“We’re always building,” Schneider said in August. “I don’t know about the rebuilding part. Honestly, it’s just the way other people think about things. You can’t control the way other people view what you are trying to do. We don’t view it that way because we’ve had the same approach ever since we came through the doors in 2010 together, which is that every single day we’re trying to get better in every single area.”
But then, in the closest thing that sounds like an admission that the “R” word is at least somewhat in play, Schneider said: “When you move on from people who are Hall of Fame-caliber players like Russell Wilson and Bobby Wagner, you’ve got to replace those guys. And that’s a process. It doesn’t necessarily happen overnight.”
OK, so maybe it’s going to be a process to get back to, first, a winning record and, second, maybe a Super Bowl.
If so, consider it one that can be broken down into four parts.
Embracing an uncommon challenge
What the Seahawks are trying to do — get back to the Super Bowl with a completely different team but the same coach/execs in charge — is pretty much unprecedented in NFL history, especially in the salary-cap era.
Joe Gibbs led Washington to three Super Bowl wins from 1983-92 with three different quarterbacks. But many of the other key components were the same throughout — three offensive linemen started all three games, for instance.
Don Shula got Miami to the Super Bowl with three different quarterbacks. But two were Hall of Famers — Bob Griese and Dan Marino — and he won a Super Bowl with only one of them (Griese).
The 49ers of the ‘80s and ‘90s won five Super Bowls in a span of 13 years with two different QBs. They were able to seamlessly transition from Joe Montana to Steve Young, both future Hall of Famers, and were able to keep many key players before the cap was instituted in 1994.
The Bill Belichick/Tom Brady Patriots have obviously reset the expectations for what is possible with six Super Bowl wins over a 17-year period. Still, all that came with Brady as QB.
But winning with two completely different rosters and quarterbacks in the hard-cap era?
Schneider says it’s no different from the task that has faced the Seahawks since January 2010 — when he and Carroll arrived — of assembling, as he has always called it, “a consistent championship-caliber football team.”
“We are all competitors at our core,” Schneider said. “You relish the competitive part of this league and putting an incredible product on the field, the best product you can possibly put out there. So yeah, you relish trying to fix whatever looks deficient in every area.”
Finding new leaders
One reason you might not find Carroll and Schneider admitting that the Seahawks are rebuilding is some of the talent that remains on hand.
While quarterback remains a big question mark — Geno Smith is going to start the opener but little seems assured from there — the Seahawks feel as if much of the rest of the roster is where they want it to be with skill position players such as receivers DK Metcalf and Tyler Lockett, defensive Pro Bowlers such as safeties Jamal Adams and Quandre Diggs and young, emerging players such as linebacker Jordyn Brooks and running back Rashaad Penny.
And while one can argue the importance of leadership — an intangible that tends to work better if the players doing the leading have elite talent — it’s worth wondering which players will take over that mantle now that Wilson and Wagner are gone. Wilson was a team captain every year since 2013 and Wagner all but one year since 2015, not only guiding voices in the locker room but also the most visible faces of the team to the public.
Carroll says not to worry.
“It’s Quandre and Jamal,” he said. “[Defensive tackle] Al [Woods], Jordyn Brooks — who’s younger but has stepped up — [linebackers] Cody [Barton], Nick Bellore, [tight end Will] Dissly, Tyler and DK. Those are all the guys that have the awareness. They are the guys that the people will listen to, and it’s not hard to see that.”
The real proof will come in a few months.
Building around speed and competition
Another reason Carroll and Schneider feel the team is in a better place than others might?
They look around and see a roster that is younger, faster and maybe more competitive than a lot of those in recent seasons — and in that way, reminiscent of 2010-13, when Seattle built what was maybe the most talented roster in the NFL by preaching speed and competition.
Carroll has said the team is the fastest he’s had in Seattle, while acknowledging there’s a difference between speed in practice and on game days.
Schneider agrees, pointing to not only the likes of obvious players such as Brooks and Metcalf and rookie cornerback Tariq Woolen, but also Barton and others such as young edge rushers Darrell Taylor and Boye Mafe.
“You definitely notice that,” Schneider said. “I think we are very fast offensively, defensively, the defensive backfield.”
What they’ve also felt with the turning over of a new guard is a heightened sense of competitiveness.
That young players have come in the past few years knowing there’s a chance to play immediately they feel has created an edge that maybe some teams of the past lacked.
“It’s hard to preach competition when you have the highest-paid free safety, the highest-paid cornerback, the highest-paid quarterback, all that stuff,” Schneider said. “It’s hard for guys to feel like they truly have a shot to compete to start in front of that player.”
There isn’t any of that now, where the Seahawks could start three rookies immediately — left tackle Charles Cross, right tackle Abraham Lucas and Woolen — with three others (Mafe, running back Ken Walker III, cornerback Coby Bryant) likely to have significant roles.
The counterpoint?
Youth is unproven until it isn’t. For now, the Seahawks have a lot of spots that need proving.
Executing a two-year plan
If no one involved wants to admit this is a rebuild, they most certainly aren’t going to put a timeline to its completion.
But here’s the reality — this feels like what is at most a two-year process to prove that the team is back on course to consistent winning records and playoff berths, or there could be even greater change in the offing. And not just because Carroll turns 71 on Sept. 15.
The nine draft picks this year and the two firsts and two seconds Seattle has next year thanks to the Wilson trade allow for the Seahawks to quickly build a new, young core.
The Seahawks also will have salary cap space like they’ve rarely had beginning next year with Wilson’s contract fully coming off the books.
So maybe, like Baldwin and Bennett said, the Seahawks can do what they did a decade ago — first build the core of the rest of the team and then find a quarterback to take it over the top.
The hope is that in Lucas and Cross the Seahawks have found offensive pillars for the next decade. That Woolen and Bryant can form the Legion of Boom 2.0. And that the proven talent such as Metcalf, Adams, Diggs and Brooks can stay at their current level to help keep things afloat while the young players grow.
And then, assuming that Smith and Drew Lock aren’t the long-term answer — and as of now, that seems the safest bet — the Seahawks can use the picks and cap space they will have in 2023 to find a quarterback, the way they did Wilson in 2012.
But if none of that is evident by the end of the 2023 season — and with a complete bottoming-out having not happened in 2022 — harder questions, and even harder decisions, might be at hand.
First will simply be getting used to the Seahawks without Wilson and Wagner.
“It just feels different, obviously,” Schneider said of watching someone other than Wilson quarterbacking the Seahawks. “But mentally I was prepared for it because we started talking about [trade talks] at the [NFL scouting] combine [in late February]. So it was kind of done and over. You’ve got to keep moving forward and not looking to the past.”
It’s that past and trying to match it, though, that hovers ominously as the Seahawks move into a most tenuous future.