The Seahawks suddenly have a void in leadership

Who will step up and help form their new identity?

As you are all but certainly aware by now, the Seattle Seahawks released Jamal Adams and Quandre Diggs, marking the end of an era for the defense that will mostly be remembered for what they were not — the Legion of Boom — rather than what they were — a talented group of players, and in the case of Quandre Diggs, a team leader. Couple this with the release of Will Dissly and the less than emphatic commitment to Geno Smith, and we are starting to see a picture emerge that is… less than pretty.

While it may be true that it is often darkest just before the dawn, we don’t know exactly when dawn will arrive or just how dark it will get before a new day breaks. Such is the reality of rebuilding a roster. This is clearly different than what we saw two years ago, where Pete Carroll and John Schneider took what was supposed to be a basement-dweller team and instead put Geno Smith in a position to lead that scrappy squad to the playoffs. It was fun, but we all knew deep down this was not going to be the roster that brought another trophy to the city of Seattle. This was a good team with good coaching and a relentless fanbase.

All that being said, what shouldn’t get lost in the fray is that this team outperformed when by all rights, the majority of us expected them to suck. While the leadership of Pete Carroll played a big role in setting the stage, the players themselves were the ones who built and maintained the culture. Over the years, the players changed, and the dynamics shifted, but ultimately this team exhibited the signs of a stable, competitive team, albeit very rarely a dominant one. This is where guys like Quandre Diggs, Bobby Wagner, and Geno Smith came in; not just for their football capabilities, but for their unique talents at galvanizing a group of people to put their best efforts towards the collective goal. They played a role in motivating their squads and the younger players to perform to a level better than anticipated, and they brought a fiery competitive spirit to every game.

I will keep this brief, because I have no pretenses of having any answers, or even any expectations. These roster moves today don’t feel like the punctuation at the end of a sentence; it is the epilogue of a novel. And that isn’t bad — we all remember the fraudulent case of misleading advertising that was “the Neverending story,” which thankfully did come to an end. Conclusions are necessary, but not necessarily fun. This one most certainly is not fun, for me at least. I’ve been a Seahawks fan long enough to know when we have something good going, and this was one of those times. You know how many other times in my life I have felt that way? Once. The early 2000s. Before that, I was just happy to get within reaching distance of Ricky Watters and Joey Galloway at training camp. That is not an excuse for mediocrity, and a change at leadership was overdue. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgement that having a winning football team to root for every year is wonderful, amazing, and undoubtedly rare thing… and we need to start considering the possibility that this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.