{"id":858744,"date":"2026-04-07T11:12:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/858744\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T11:12:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T11:12:18","slug":"the-seahawks-plan-to-contend-for-more-super-bowls-is-locked-away-in-a-safe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/858744\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seahawks\u2019 Plan to Contend for More Super Bowls Is Locked Away in a Safe"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can check out my full takeaways for this week here<\/a>, but I wanted to go a little longer on the offseason the defending champs are having in Seattle.<\/p>\n

This second group of championship Seahawks is going to be built a little differently than the first. The why and how of that sit in a stack of green lab books, locked away in a safe in the office of Seattle\u2019s two-time Lombardi Trophy\u2013winning GM, John Schneider.<\/p>\n

The practice of journaling goes way back for Schneider, all the way to his early days as a young Packers assistant in the 1990s. It\u2019s fallen off, come back, evolved and become therapy for the accomplished roster architect. Now, all these years later, it\u2019s both what Schneider requires of himself on a regular basis and where so many of his team-building secrets live.<\/p>\n

\u201cA, it\u2019s a stress reliever,\u201d Schneider said in a quiet moment over lunch at last week\u2019s owners meetings. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a reminder of how you were feeling in this negotiation, or this period of time. What was going on? You can go right back to the moment instead of having revisionist history. It\u2019s being disciplined enough, say, the night before the draft, knowing, O.K., this is where we picked and this is what it feels like when you\u2019re waiting. Or this is what it looks like when you don’t have a second-round pick, what that feels like when however many players are coming off the board.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou discipline yourself to not be going crazy, to not do something drastic, whether it be for the next year or the back half of the draft. Like, Chill out, everything\u2019s gonna work out.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like everything fell apart the last time Schneider was in this position, coming off a win in Super Bowl XLVIII with a roster full of still-ascending young talent.<\/p>\n

The Seahawks, in fact, made it back to the Super Bowl the next year, losing by the thinnest of margins<\/a> to Tom Brady and the Patriots, then returned to the playoffs the next two years after that. The championship came in the second year of a nine-year run through which Seattle missed the playoffs just once and won the NFC West four times.<\/p>\n

The easy thing would be to look back on that with satisfaction and there is, to be sure, some of that for Schneider. But he also has taken a critical eye to his construction of those teams\u2014and what prevented that group from adding more Lombardis with such a gifted core.<\/p>\n

\u201cLooking back at that group, there was a lot of challenge from the outside, like, You can\u2019t keep all these guys together,\u201d Schneider says. \u201cWe had one of the great defensive backfields, and defenses in general, of all time. So we\u2019re going to pay the Mike linebacker, we\u2019re gonna pay the Sam linebacker, we\u2019re gonna pay the strong safety, the free safety, the top corner. What happens there is, A, you can get real top-heavy, and B, you\u2019re taking away from other aspects of the team.\u201d<\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t to say that he wouldn\u2019t pay Richard Sherman or Earl Thomas or Bobby Wagner again. He would, of course, keep a lot of those guys. He just might not keep all of them.<\/p>\n

And reminders of that are all over those lab books.<\/p>\n

The genesis of that journaling, for Schneider, came in the Packers\u2019 Super Bowl season of 1996. He took notes on how GM Ron Wolf and the staff were operating during the season, with this idea: What if we aren\u2019t as good as we think? Turns out, they were. Green Bay won it all, and Schneider, by his own admission, got a little lazy, and the entries into the lab books became more sporadic.<\/p>\n

In 2001, at 29, he went with Marty Schottenheimer to Washington, becoming de facto GM for the veteran coach he had worked with in Kansas City. They were both fired after a year, and going through that pushed Schneider, who then returned to Green Bay, to reprise his practice of putting pen to paper. He journaled on everything he observed working for Mike Sherman and Mark Hatley, then Ted Thompson and Mike McCarthy with the Packers.<\/p>\n

Some of it would be what you\u2019d expect, all the background on picks and signings. Other things were less so, like what he\u2019d have done were he the Browns\u2019 GM after Kellen Winslow II\u2019s motorcycle accident in 2005. All of it pointed at what he\u2019d do if he got a second shot at running his own shop, after the short-circuited stint in D.C.<\/p>\n

In Seattle, it has become an ever-growing road map for him. And this offseason, those lessons on picking his spots were huge, as he and his crew had to choose who stays and who goes.<\/p>\n

\"Rashid<\/p>\n

While the Seahawks have made difficult decisions to let players go, Rashid Shaheed is one player Schneider decided to keep. | Steven Bisig-Imagn Images<\/p>\n

One clear regret Schneider had from the last time around, as his journals detailed: How the investment in that really special core wound up eroding Seattle\u2019s offensive line.<\/p>\n

As a result of paying his offensive skill guys and defensive stars, Schneider had to go young and cheap on the offensive line. It hurt the Seahawks, in his words, \u201cBecause you rob Peter to pay Paul, and offensive line\u2019s a hard position to acquire anyway.\u201d He has even told ex-Seattle center Max Unger that he regrets including him in the Jimmy Graham deal in March 2015 (which is not to say he wouldn\u2019t deal for Graham again, just that he should\u2019ve valued Unger more).<\/p>\n

\u201cIn retrospect, he was such a centerpiece,\u201d Schneider says. \u201cHe could\u2019ve helped us through that process where other players couldn\u2019t have because he was such a foundational stud.\u201d<\/p>\n

So this time around, the Seahawks looked at players, but positions, too\u2014and which ones would be tougher to replace than others. He hated seeing Coby Bryant, who took one for the team and went through a position change he didn\u2019t initially love (from cornerback to safety), head elsewhere. He also didn\u2019t like losing Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III, who had grown so much in Seattle. Same went for corner Riq Woolen and defensive end Boye Mafe. \u201cThat\u2019s the challenge,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But the journal didn\u2019t just affect defections.<\/p>\n

In the case of receiver Rashid Shaheed, it actually caused Seattle to take a U-turn and retain him. Initially, Schneider thought Shaheed would be gone, after he had dealt fourth- and fifth-round picks for the ex-Saint at the trade deadline to get him. In fact, one of the things he had taken from previous entries then written down after the season was, \u201cHey, we\u2019re trying to get him back, we want him back, but it\u2019s O.K. if we can\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t be super passionate about the [trade] compensation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But at the same time, Schneider had also jotted down all the different ways Shaheed had affected games down the stretch of the regular season, then into the playoffs, both on offense and on special teams. So as the receiver market settled, Schneider had resolved to stay loose, rather than just coming to terms with an impending departure and, to the surprise of some, worked out a three-year, $51 million deal with Shaheed.<\/p>\n

Likewise, going forward, there are lessons learned he\u2019ll take from the Legion of Boom years and apply them to the draft. One is that now that his young players have become more accomplished and gotten paid, he and his scouts and the coaches will have to be even more vigilant in seeing that they bring the right types of competitors into the building to maintain the program.<\/p>\n

\u201cDraft-wise, you\u2019d better be damn sure those people coming in that you\u2019re drafting are ready to compete with those players, when you\u2019re saying, that\u2019s the highest-paid player at this position or the third-highest-paid or what have you,\u201d Schneider says. \u201cIt\u2019s the ultimate team sport, you\u2019re talking about competing all the time. You have to make sure with the character, they\u2019re not enamored with Earl Thomas or Kam Chancellor\u2014they\u2019re ready to compete with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

So now, we\u2019ll get to see how all this comes together, as Schneider keeps scribbling notes out by hand and throwing green lab books into that safe. At this point, nearly three decades of trade secrets are locked in there, as is what amounts to a living history of the Seahawks\u2019 franchise since 2010, around when the detail in Schneider\u2019s entries grew and that safe was purchased.<\/p>\n

He knew the value of what was in those books then. And he does even more so now.<\/p>\n

More NFL From Sports Illustrated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can check out my full takeaways for this week here, but I wanted to go a little…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2081],"tags":[7,6,238,237,261,2635],"class_list":{"0":"post-858744","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-seattle-seahawks","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-nfl","10":"tag-seahawks","11":"tag-seattle","12":"tag-seattle-seahawks","13":"tag-seattleseahawks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116363129338101546","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}