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The Opener
Seven Months Later, the Champs Are Pretending It Never Happened
The Seahawks open the season Wednesday night against the team they beat 29-13 in Super Bowl LX, and the championship banner goes into the Lumen Field rafters before kickoff. Ask anyone inside the building about it and you get a polite nod and an immediate change of subject. Mike Macdonald has spent seven months coaching that reflex into them.
29-13
Seattle’s Super Bowl LX win over New England. The rematch is Wednesday night, same opponent, right after the banner goes up.
The phrase the team landed on is “run it forward,” and Seahawks.com put the blunt version in a headline: this group has to start from the bottom all over again. That is a true sentence and a coach’s sentence, and it is also a slightly insane thing to ask of men who were on a championship parade through downtown Seattle in February.
Leonard Williams called celebrating that win with fans at the parade “one of the most special moments of my career and my life.” Now he is expected to file it somewhere and go hit a guard. Macdonald said Saturday that he likes how the group has handled the whole business. “They’ve done a great job,” he said, which is exactly what a man says when the answer is required to be boring.
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The healthy version of this isn’t amnesia. It’s letting Wednesday be enormous, then playing sixteen more games like it wasn’t.
My problem with the exercise is the staging. The banner rises with Soundgarden waiting to play halftime and the Patriots standing on the same turf, watching it go up, having flown across the country for the privilege. You cannot un-ring that bell by calling it Week 1.
So let it be big. Wednesday is allowed to be enormous. Thursday is when the amnesia starts.
SOURCES →
Roster
They Cut D’Anthony Bell in August. They Needed Him By Saturday.
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The math has since explained itself. The safety room on the 53 is Julian Love, Ty Okada and Nick Emmanwori, and ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler reported this week that Emmanwori is “iffy at best” for the opener after ankle surgery. Two healthy safeties, one nationally televised banner night, no fourth name anywhere.
3
Safeties on Seattle’s initial 53. One of them may not be able to play Wednesday.
Bell is not a stranger to any of this. He appeared in 14 games with two starts for Seattle last season and spent this summer taking first-team reps while Emmanwori rehabbed. On Friday the front office auditioned six offensive players at the VMAC and signed none of them. On Saturday they picked up the phone and called a guy whose locker they had just emptied.
SOURCES →
AROUND THE COOP
Around the Coop
Jadarian Price practiced Friday and will make his NFL debut Wednesday, three preseason games after everybody else made theirs. Macdonald: “Excited for JD to play.” Price: “I’m prepared my whole life for it.” The first handoff is going to feel like a public holiday. Seahawks.com
AJ Barner had two surgeries after the Super Bowl and says he feels very good, allowing that you always have “a nick here or there, nature of the business.” Seattle’s first injury report drops Monday. He has pre-announced that he won’t be on it. SI
Power Echols is out of the building. Seattle waived the linebacker from injured reserve with an injury settlement Saturday, days after he reverted to IR. A settlement is the polite goodbye: he gets paid for the weeks he was hurt, and Seattle gets the roster spot back. Pro Football Rumors
Terrion Arnold cannot practice and cannot play, and nobody will name a date. Macdonald says the cornerback is “learning the heck out of our defense” from the commissioner’s exempt list. Seattle is currently paying a first-round talent to be outstanding in meetings. Yahoo Sports
NFC WEST SCHADENFREUDE REPORT
RAMS
Los Angeles named eleven team captains. Eleven, on a roster of 53, before a single snap has been played. That is one in every five Rams outranking you in the huddle. Three of them arrived this calendar year, which is a bold thing to put to a vote about men you met in July. Stafford makes it six straight seasons, so at least one of the letters was earned the slow way.
NINERS
Melbourne opens NFL game week today, and it does so with an attempt at the world record for the largest cheerleading dance, staged in a public square. That is San Francisco’s Sunday. Ours involves a walkthrough and a stadium that already knows the way to our building. Nobody in Occidental Park is attempting anything, and that is precisely the point.
CARDINALS
Arizona finished 3-14 and has responded by giving receiver Michael Wilson a three-year, $75 million extension with $47 million guaranteed and a max value of $78 million. Twenty-five million a year, to a former third-round pick, on a roster that spent last season losing every game in this division. Somebody in Tempe is picking out furniture for a house that hasn’t been framed.
SEACHICKENS TRIVIA
This coach was announced as Mike Holmgren’s successor a full year before he actually got the job, went 5-11 in his only season in charge, and was fired in January 2010. Who is he?
Tap to Reveal the Answer
Jim Mora. Seattle named him coach-in-waiting before the 2008 season and handed him a five-year contract, then fired him after one year and hired Pete Carroll instead.
THIS DAY IN SEAHAWKS HISTORY
1998
September 6, 1998
Seattle Opens the Season by Erasing Philadelphia
The Seahawks went to Philadelphia for the 1998 opener and came home with a 38-0 shutout, sacking the Eagles quarterback nine times in one afternoon. Dennis Erickson’s team then finished 8-8, because that is what the Kingdome years did to you: they showed you exactly what was possible in Week 1 and spent four months walking it back.
Got a Question? Ask It.
Contract math, depth chart grievances, unresolved anger about a punt from 2015. The mailbag takes all of it. Send yours in and include a name and a neighborhood so I can credit you properly when the answer disappoints you.
Wednesday, 5:20. Be loud early. — The Rooster