Devon Witherspoon is already stepping into a leadership role in Seattle, and that matters a lot

Devon Witherspoon is already stepping into a leadership role in Seattle, and that matters a lot

good afternoon everybody we’ve got another afternoon video here today we’re going to start seeing more and more of these because we’re getting closer to the season closer to having more things to discuss more things to talk about after a little period of remaining relatively dormant things are going to start to pick up here and the thing I want to go into in this video a little bit is an article that Brady Henderson posted this morning on ESPN the great Brady Henderson hasn’t been Super Active lately because there just isn’t a lot to talk about but as we get closer and closer to the season there’s going to be more stuff to get into but for the time being what Brady Henderson has for us is an article about Devin Witherspoon and some of the things that he’s observing and I wanted to talk about this even though this doesn’t qualify as like news this isn’t something that is just happening today this isn’t something that is new to even this season I want to talk about this a little bit because it makes me think about some of the conversations that people were having last year and this does strike me as something of a big deal so if you want to read the whole article go to ESPN again it’s a Brady Henderson article just posted it this morning um you can find it on the Seahawks homepage on ESPN it basically has to do with how Devon Witherspoon despite being a very young player despite only being in year two of his NFL career is already becoming one of the big leaders on this team so you go through the article real quick here there’s a little mention about how the practices are different under McDonald than they were under Carol Carol liked to play Loud Music McDonald likes to play very quiet music he likes to have players communicating with other players and coaches communicating with players and the thing that he drew attention to in this article is that the guy you can hear the most when you’re at the vmac during these practice sessions is Devon Witherspoon he’s the guy who’s constantly trying to uh lead people the right way he’s the guy who is continually trying to kind of carry the torch for that unit and he’s even though he’s new even though he’s new to this league he is becoming the big leader um for maybe the whole team and it kind of makes sense because as this article mentions he might already be our best player which is crazy but not every Elite player takes a leadership role on a team um there have been players who have been Elite All Pro level players there have been players that are considered by some to be the best player at their position in the entire league and they’re not leaders or anything even close to a leader according to most people so this is notable and to me it is also very significant but you got this quote from Leonard Williams about how Witherspoon is somebody um who has a lot more fire than you would expect he’s somebody who you who has a lot more who’s a lot more vocal than you would expect he’s a guy who’s constantly barking um there’s some stuff about how there was the legion of boom which was a very vocal and outspoken bunch and then the Seahawks tried to go the opposite way with guys who were a little more quiet and that it it was basically an overcorrection and then they tried to bring in Jamal Adams to go back the other way but Adams wasn’t on the field enough so now finally here they are in back where they were with the legion of boom or at least the start of it because of this Witherspoon guy so I think we all kind of have this feeling I think we all kind of got the sense that Witherspoon was doing more than just playing football he was also taking on this I guess you could call it a leadership role he was taking on the responsibility of being very loud he was taking on the responsibility of being that leader and it made me think about one thing from the KJ Wright podcast uh La late last year I made a video about this and usually I don’t make videos about uh KJ Wright’s uh show on the radio it’s not a podcast it’s um Seattle sports radio but uh I made a video last year about one show that he did because he kind of aired out a lot of the things that he thought he saw about the Seahawks during that time when they were going through their three- game or four game losing streak and he was seen so many things he didn’t like I thought it was interesting to hear him um voice some of his concerns about the team and one thing that he said that stuck with me was the team didn’t have leadership the team lacked really solid leaders and what he said was that a an NFL team should have four legitimate leaders and he thought we had one maybe two and the one leader that he gave was Bobby Wagner Bobby Wagner is not here anymore Bobby Wagner signed with another team in the off season so you are going into a season where of what we had last year if you asked KJ Wright the only leader that still on the team is jiren Reed and he was very passive in naming jiren Reed as a leader he was not really all that into it he certainly dismissed the idea of Gino Smith being a leader he dismissed the idea of I think it was Tyler Lockett being leader um he couldn’t really come up with any anybody else so if that’s true and I’m not saying everything that KJ Wright says is true in fact there’s a lot that I disagree with him on and I I think there’s a lot of things that KJ Wright misses the boat on when it comes to this kind of stuff but I thought this was believable you look at the team last year and if you were trying to find leaders you would definitely say Bobby Wagner you might be able to say jiren Reed but past that it get it gets tough so you’re looking at the team this year going into the 2024 season we know we know that the coaching staff has talked about how Gino Smith needs to take that next step in becoming a leader and I think Gino Smith’s ability to take that next step to become a leader is going to determine whether or not he’s the quarterback after 2024 so to me that’s something that is there’s at least an attempt being made and I’m not saying that necessarily means that it’s going to happen but there is certainly an attempt being made to make Gino Smith a leader and preferably you’d you’d want it to happen organically but at the same time Gino Smith’s career has been very a typical of a typical of a normal NFL career so if Gino Smith decides to become a leader this year then okay then you’ve got lak and Tomlinson and I admittedly do not love the idea of having a I’m going to say the the phrase washed up veteran being one of your leaders but there is every indication so far this offseason that the Seahawks of view lak and Tomlinson is one of the leaders in their Clubhouse and somebody who they lean on heavily for veteran experience and knoow so you’ve got hypothetically Gino Smith and lak and Tomlinson now Tomlinson probably has to keep his starting job for this to be a thing because I can’t believe you would be an effective leader from the bench looking at a rookie playing in front of you or a second-year player like Anthony Bradford playing in front of you but for the moment you’ve got hypothet IC Ally two leaders and then you go over to the defensive side of the ball Devon Witherspoon I mean we just spent all this time talking about how he has really taken on that role has really been a guy who’s been all over the place a guy who’s been loud a guy who’s been vocal a guy who’s been voracious in how he’s approached um approached um his pro career so far despite his youth so you’ve got that and theoretically you would just need one more and you still have jiren Reed on the team if you believe that jiren Reed takes on that leadership role that gets you to where KJ Wright said you needed to be and then you’ve got some other guys who I don’t know maybe like Leonard is Leonard Williams a leader AJ Wright didn’t mention him last year but Leonard Williams had only been here for about a month and a half when he made that uh made that show uh when he made that comment so maybe maybe a guy like boy MAF grows into that maybe one of these inside linebackers we got grows into that uh Baker Dodson maybe one of those guys becomes the leader so you start putting it together and it starts to become very believable and viable that this team is going to have the leadership that they didn’t have last year from the group of players so that’s why I wanted to draw attention to this article that’s why I do think this is kind of a big deal that’s why I think this matters there was a need for this kind of a thing there was a desire for having players that are a little bit louder having players that are willing to get in front having players that are capable of steering the ship in the right direction when things aren’t going so great because the coaches can only do so much right the coaches can only do so much when it comes to this kind of stuff you can look to them you can certainly hope that they’re able to get the ship back on track but we have young coaches for the most part we have a head coach that has never been head coach before we have an offensive coordinator that has never worked in the NFL before and that that’s most of most of the battle right there the guys we have that have a ton of experience doing this kind of stuff guys like uh Leslie Frasier they’re in smaller roles and I’m not saying they’re not going to be impactful but you need some players that can guide things back to the way we need them to go and that’s why KJ Wright talked about what he talked about last last year a little bit when we went on a losing streak and things were going badly and the defense was headed in the wrong direction and things were just going south we couldn’t really look to the players to write the ship it was all on the coaches and the coaches just weren’t capable of doing it so good article I just wanted to go ahead and talk about this a little bit because it’s really cool that we have found this player that is capable of doing this already because like I said there are great players in this league elite players in this league that don’t like um just um there there was some when Russell Wilson was here there were years where Russell Wilson was a top two top three quarterback in this league there were years where Russell Wilson was the best quarterback in his conference and there were still questions like I don’t know if this guy’s really a leader or at least not the kind of leader that you’re talking about when it comes to riding the ship people still wondered about that people wonder about a you know I don’t think anybody thinks DK metf is a leader even though he’s one of the better receivers in football um I think that even if a guy like Charles cross becomes an elite left tackle and I don’t know if he will I don’t know if people would ever consider him a leader we’re not seeing that from him yet that doesn’t seem to be his personality so having something like this happen it’s a big deal all right guys I’ll see yall later today today or tomorrow go Hawks let me know what you think just wanted to go ahead and talk about this article because I I really like what I hear about this

Could this be the big difference from 2023?

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