Michael Gervais is a well-known sports psychologist who used to work directly with the Seattle Seahawks. He sat down with Seahawks General Manager John Schneider for an hour long interview, touching on a lot of subjects.
I’m guilty of thinking about John’s job strictly in terms of the football roster and coaches. As a general manager, his position is wide ranging involving overseeing everything in the entire organization. He still wants to do things better than they’ve ever been done before. If you thought that was just a Pete Carroll mantra, think again.
“I tell people all the time, nothing has changed…philosophically since Pete [Carroll] and I walked through the door here in 2010. We’re trying to do it better than everybody else every single day.
One thing that we always knew but was never directly talked about – John Schneider wants to win.
“The fans know every day that…we’re going to have a team that’s not going to win 2 or 3 games or something like that. We’re not trying to get a certain draft pick.”
Continuing on from that, Schneider drew upon the idea of tanking, a common practice in the NBA.
“To me, that’s unacceptable.”
Yeah, that’s pretty cut and dry to me. Tanking in the NFL is career suicide, where it seems like coaches and GMs are turned over every few years. If Seattle loses that many games, Schneider loses his job.
John also discussed the decisions made to pay all of their LOB-era players instead of moving on from some of them. He mentioned that it made it tough to fill out the roster because of the need to “rob Peter to pay Paul.”
“We kind of had to fit some other players that didn’t really fit our mold of the tough, gritty, swaggy, smart, reliable football players…we went off course a little bit.”
Those draft classes in the mid and late 2010s are evidence of that statement. Hopefully Schneider has learned from those mistakes…the past few draft classes seem to have the team going in the right direction.
There are plenty more things that Gervais and Schneider talked about in this lengthy interview. If you’ve got the time, it’s worth a listen!
