INDIANAPOLIS — The Seattle Seahawks’ most important work this week won’t involve 40-yard-dash times, bench presses or cone drills.
It won’t have much to do with 332 prospects posing in their underwear in one of sports’ more dehumanizing meat-market appraisals of body shape, either.
To Seattle coach and personnel chief Pete Carroll those tests are just numbers “and all that stuff.”
The most impacting work the Seahawks will do at the league’s scouting combine Wednesday through Monday won’t have as much to do with anything the exiting collegians do on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium — though that’s what you will see as apparently defining this annual event, because it’s what the league’s network will broadcast live each day.
If the Seahawks succeed here this week, in free agency that begins March 9 and in the draft April 28-30 — as they have often in the six-year-old Carroll-John Schneider regime — it will be because of what they learn in the personal interviews they conduct with players. Seattle and every other NFL team gets up to 60 interviews inside a room at the Crown Plaza hotel across the street from the stadium. There are also less-structured chats with players to whom team personnel can talk inside Union Station, Indianapolis’ central train station adjacent to the hotel.
There are also unlimited meetings and chance run-ins inside hallways and corridors with representatives of free agents. Those talks will include agents for some of the Seahawks’ 18 free agents.
That’s where Seattle’s truest action will happen at the combine. They will be the latest pieces in a process that also includes college all-star game weeks, Pro Day workouts, chats and ongoing team investigations on college campuses and bringing a select number of prospects to team headquarters for more interviewing.
That — and not drafting the cornerback with the fastest 40 time available, or the running back that generates the biggest buzz in Indianapolis — is how Carroll and general manager Schneider build the Seahawks’ locker-room and overall culture.
“If I’m going to find somebody’s best, I need to get them as close to what their true potential is, and connected to who they are — and call on that to be consistent,” Carroll said last month. “It’s really hard to be something that you’re not, but it’s asked of people a lot. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to realize that these guys have really special, unique qualities about themselves and then try to figure out how to fit it together.”
For Carroll and Schneider, the attitude and makeup of a player they may eventually draft or sign is the key component to the Seahawks’ locker-room culture. And that culture has worked. Seattle has reached four consecutive postseasons, two of the last three Super Bowls and won the franchise’s first NFL title.
The Seahawks’ coach and GM learn much about a player’s fortitude looking him in the eye in the personal interview sessions in Indianapolis. The formal ones at the hotel last 15 minutes each, per league rules.
It’s in that meeting and others with Frank Clark this time last year — not through bench presses and shuttle runs inside the Colts’ stadium — that Carroll and Schneider became convinced they knew enough of Clark’s makeup to make him their top draft choice in 2015. It’s where they asked about Clark going from being homeless at age 11 to being a star pass-rusher at the University of Michigan. It’s how they felt satisfied with the adjudication of Clark getting kicked off the Michigan team late in his final season there in 2014 following an arrest and jailing in his home state of Ohio for assault and domestic violence. The charge got reduced to a lesser one in a plea bargain.
Some teams dropped Clark from their draft board. Most saw him as fourth- or fifth-round pick.
Seattle made him its first selection last year, in the second round.
Carroll knew through interviews with Clark and those close to him the player’s background of growing up in the rough Baldwin Village area of Los Angeles. Carroll has been on the area’s crime-filled streets often from when he coached and recruited at nearby USC then started his philanthropic “A Better L.A.” organization.
“We are really a relationship-based program,” Carroll said last spring.
Clark played in 15 regular-season games and both playoff ones this past season, finishing his rookie year with four total sacks as a situational rush end and staying out of trouble. He had a sack of Cam Newton in Seattle’s season-ending loss at Carolina in the divisional playoffs last month.
He wouldn’t have been there without the interviews Carroll and Schneider did with him at last year’s combine.
These fact- and character-finding talks go far beyond the combine, free agency and the draft.
No one drafted Thomas Rawls last year as a transfer out of Central Michigan. He missed the team’s bowl game with what the Chippewas announced was an academic issue. In September of 2014 Central Michigan suspended him for two games when he was facing felony charges in a purse-snatching incident inside a Michigan casino. According to the Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, Rawls eventually entered a guilty plea to a high-court misdemeanor of attempted larceny in a building. He was sentenced to a year of probation, 104 hours of community service to be completed in nine months, plus fines and restitution costs.
The Seahawks signed Rawls as undrafted free agent last May. He filled in when Marshawn Lynch had the only injury-filled season of his career — and became the first undrafted rookie in league history to rush for at least 160 yards twice.
Rawls will replace the now-retired Lynch as Seattle’s lead back for the 2016 season once he recovers from a broken ankle and torn ligaments this offseason.
All because of more Seahawks interviewing — not the vertical jumps and “gauntlet drills” you are going to see this week on TV from the combine.
“I think it’s extraordinarily important, because we are what their attitude is, and who they are,” Carroll said. “So we’ve tried to find guys that have a sense about them that they can overcome whatever the odds are, and that they’re going to hang through anything. And that is demonstrated in the passion that they bring to their pursuits too. It’s exactly what we are looking for.
“We don’t care what their number is in the draft class. We just want to find guys that love playing, and they’ve got something, and they’re not going to be denied.
“That’s really where we’ve tried to build a whole crew around that.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
