RENTON — If the Seattle Seahawks’ offensive line goes from faulty to functional this year, they could thank Kim Fant.
And Walter Jones.
George Fant is on the eve of his second year of playing, not just for Seattle, but in competitive football. Should he grow into his left-tackle job this coming season like he’s growing into his 6-foot-5 basketball body, it would eliminate the biggest issue on Seattle’s most problematic unit.
Fant has gained 70 pounds in less than two years. He’s up to “321, something like that,” he said.
That’s 25 or so more than the team’s listed weight for him, and what the former Western Kentucky power forward weighed at the start of the offseason, in January.
“My mom lives with me now. She’s brought that good Southern food for me,” Fant said this week following one of Seattle’s final practices of organized team activities, where he was the starting left tackle.
“She likes to make steak. There’s a little grill she’s got. She likes steaks. Potatoes. Macaroni.
“I was watching my portions of food before. Now, I’m just kind of eatin’!”
Then he chuckled.
Fant is among the perhaps three percent of American adults with a free license and clear conscience to chow down.
Kim Fant relocated this winter from George’s hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Seattle. She moved in with her son and daughter-in-law, former Western Kentucky basketball star Chastity Gooch.
George’s and Chastity’s son, Jayden, was born shortly before the March 2016 tryout at WKU that wowed the Seahawks into signing him as an undrafted rookie free agent last year. Two months ago, Chastity delivered their second son.
Two babies under 18 months old under the same roof was one too many for only one mom. So George’s mother, herself a former Western Kentucky basketball player (the former Kim Norman played for WKU in 1990 and ‘91), came to live with them in Seattle this offseason.
“My wife needs the help,” Fant said.
The result: Fant has gone from 250 pounds in 2015 playing basketball for WKU, to 290 pounds during last season, to 320 pounds now. He’s noticeably bulkier in the shoulders, chest and torso. Yet he appeared in OTA drills that ended Friday to have retained his basketball quickness and athleticism that attracted the Seahawks to him 50-plus pounds ago.
OK, so now he’s bigger. Is he better than he was in his understandably rocky debut season?
That’s where Jones comes in.
The Seahawks Hall-of-Fame left tackle from a decade ago comes around the team from time to time, including for preseason workshops with players. At one of those drop-ins last year, in the middle of the 2016 season, Fant went up to Jones and asked for advice on how to play not only what was a new position for him, but a new sport.
What ice breaker did the undrafted rookie college basketball player use to approach one of the best left tackle in the history of the game?
“Me being the undrafted rookie and the new guy in the system, I was just like, swallow your pride and go ask this great legacy person, ‘What do you see? What do you think?’” Fant said. “So that’s what I did.
“Just taking what he says and soaking it in, adding it to my game. It’s a lot of things.”
Coach Pete Carroll is calling Fant a completely different player this spring from last season. Carroll said Fant was already going to make an “incredible jump” in learning and development from Year 1 to this season. No wonder. The ceiling was limitless, by nature. Last season was the first time Fant had started a football game on the interior line since Pee Wee league in Cincinnati, where he and his mother lived through George’s sixth-grade year.
He so surprised the Seahawks as their raw protector of $87.6 million quarterback Russell Wilson’s blind side that general manager John Schneider exclaimed “Holy cow!” over Fant being his starting left tackle.
“We were very surprised that he was able to even compete, you know?” Carroll said in early March. “It was a shock that he could compete. But he showed quite early on that he was physically capable. And then he was a beautiful competitor, as well. Had a great mentality for going for it. He wasn’t overwhelmed by it.
“He was under the gun a bunch. That was as hard as you can get for a young guy. … But he should grow more than anybody can possibly grow. He has played less than anybody (before the NFL), so hopefully he’ll make a big jump for us.”
Fant’s changed body and first-time comfort with his place on the Seahawks — heck, in the sport — seem to be changing Seattle’s plans for 2017.
At the start of this offseason, Carroll said the Seahawks wouldn’t mind giving Fant something of a redshirt season in 2017. That would be so Fant could take a step back and really learn his position, the entire line’s scheme and life in the NFL, for the long term.
That was when the Seahawks were in pursuit of Pro Bowl free-agent right guard T.J. Lang from Green Bay. The team’s plan was to move Germain Ifedi, Seattle’s top draft choice last year who started his entire rookie season at right guard, to right tackle and have Lang play right guard.
Schneider thought he had Lang ready to sign a contract after hosting him in Seattle for two days in early March. Then Lang surprised the Seahawks and signed with his hometown Detroit Lions instead.
Without Lang, Mark Glowinski will be back at his college spot of starting right guard during veteran minicamp Tuesday through Thursday; Glowinski was the left guard last season. Ifedi stayed on track and has moved to right tackle, the spot Garry Gilliam started for two seasons before he signed with San Francisco in March.
The same weekend Seattle hosted then missed on Lang, Schneider signed free-agent Luke Joeckel to a one-year contract worth $7 million guaranteed.
Joeckel, 25, entered the league as the second-overall pick by Jacksonville, and as a franchise left tackle. But Schneider has said he liked Joeckel more at left guard with the Jaguars. Left guard is where he played for five games last season before a season-ending knee injury and surgery in October.
In OTAs, Joeckel worked position drills at both left guard and left tackle, in that order, and in team drills at left guard. He’s still limited somewhat following the knee surgery.
All that has resulted in Fant remaining the first-team left tackle, for now, anyway.
With the experience of nine starts to end last regular season plus both playoff games, with Jones’ mentoring and mom’s Southern cooking, Fant is a far different number 74 in blue than he was five months ago in the Seahawks’ playoff loss at Atlanta.
“It feels really different,” he said.
“I was actually laughing about it today: I can actually understand what is going on around me. To be able to make the play, make the calls, whatever I need to adjust and know something’s coming, or Russ knows something’s coming, or the backs … it’s just so much better to know what you are doing and not have a doubt in your mind.”
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