House Seahawks

The Wound

One yard.

In February 2015 this house stood one yard from a second consecutive throne, with the largest man in the realm waiting in the backfield for a handoff that never came. They threw it instead. A rookie nobody had heard of stepped in front of it in New England’s colors, and the north went quiet for a decade.

Most wounds are slow — a drought, a decline, a lord who ages badly. Seattle’s took one second. Ask anyone here where they were and they will tell you the room, the chair, and what they were holding.

In February 2026 they beat that same house, 29–13, and took the throne.

It did not undo it. Nothing undoes it. That is rather the point.

The Lord

Sam Darnold. A man written off by two houses before this one, who arrived in Seattle carrying a reputation he had not been able to outrun since he was twenty-one — and who won the whole thing.

The Understudy

Drew Lock. Denver drafted him, looked at him for a season and a half, and decided against. He came to Seattle in 2022 as a line item in a trade about a more important man and sat a full year without being asked for anything. A season in New York. Back here in 2025 on the kind of money a house spends on someone it hopes never to need.

He has never once been anyone’s first choice, and he is very hard to embarrass.

The Knights

• Jaxon Smith-Njigba — the best of them, and this house’s answer to every question a defense asks.
• Jadarian Price — new to the court. Thirty-second overall out of Notre Dame, where he ran for 1,420 yards and eighteen scores.

The Reckoner

Jason Myers. Cold, brief, entirely without ceremony. That’s the job.

Ancient Grudges

• House Patriots. One yard in 2015. A throne in 2026. The ledger is level now, which both houses find unbearable in different directions.
• House 49ers. The border war — older, pettier, and conducted almost entirely in December.

What Changed This Spring

They let Kenneth Walker III go — the Super Bowl MVP, the man who carried them through the final field in February — and Kansas City signed him to the largest free-agent contract in the history of the sport.

The champions declined to pay their own MVP and handed the job to a thirty-second overall rookie instead. It is either ruthless cap discipline or the most arrogant thing any house did this year, and there is no way to know which until January.

Prophecy

That the throne wasn’t luck.