Seahawks Shine Under Top Brass

To that end, Leiweke and Allen's people began reconstructing the front office. They started by bringing back Mike Reinfeldt, a salary-cap expert who had been run out after Whitsitt slashed his salary a year before. Three weeks later they hired Tim Ruskell, a little-known assistant general manager who had helped build winners in Tampa Bay and Atlanta.

Immediately things took off. Reinfeldt broke a three-year impasse with the Seahawks' star left tackle, Walter Jones (a contractual snag that kept Jones from attending training camp between 2002 and 2004). "Reinfeldt got it done," Jones's agent, Roosevelt Barnes, said at the time. "He came in and got it done."

Not long after, Hasselbeck signed a six-year, $49 million deal with a $16 million signing bonus. It was a large but not outlandish sum for a quarterback most figured was about to become a big star.

In the Whitsitt years, several Seahawks officials said, the team would have waited to see the market form for Jones and Hasselbeck only to scramble and ultimately shrug if the price exceeded expectations and it would be forced to overpay. In the most outrageous example, Seattle gave free agent defensive end Grant Wistrom a $14 million signing bonus before the 2004 season when he was prepared to accept something closer to $6 million.

Ruskell hadn't studied the Seahawks closely but had seen them on one of their typical days last season when Atlanta came to Seattle for the last game of the year. The Seahawks led late, squandered the advantage, then held on to win by two points and take the NFC West championship. Afterward, the celebration was overshadowed by running back Shaun Alexander, who said he felt Holmgren kept him from a chance at the NFL rushing title that he missed by a yard.

But so much of the chaos surrounding the team seemed to disappear with Whitsitt's firing. By the time Ruskell arrived last February he found a team that wanted to win but had maybe lost its way.

"What I sense was that there was a lot of talent [in Reinfeldt and pro personnel director Will Lewis] to make the team better," said Ruskell, the team's president of football operations. "And they wanted to work with the coaching staff to do that. In Tampa, that's the way it was with Rich McKay and Tony Dungy. The times we did the best was when we all worked together."

A key was Holmgren. It was clear the coach did not coexist well with Whitsitt, especially after Whitsitt started making the personnel moves. Perhaps with a Super Bowl ring and a $32 million contract, Holmgren would resist working with Ruskell. Instead, the opposite happened.

"I never sensed he was checking me out," Ruskell said. "There wasn't a lot of friction."

Rather Ruskell met with the coaches, tried to determine what was missing. Often the determination was that there were too many players who worked for themselves rather than the team. Slowly, they went away. Troubled wide receiver Koren Robinson was dropped. Linebacker Anthony Simmons, a talented but unreliable player, left. Ken Lucas and Chike Okeafor were not re-signed when their prices on the open market went up. Ruskell signed and drafted nearly an entirely new defense and patched a hole at wideout with the steady Joe Jurevicius.

Suddenly the mistakes of old -- dropped passes, missed interceptions, the blown double-figure leads -- that plagued them in recent seasons disappeared. Then the Seahawks started winning and haven't stopped.

And as they celebrated each new step into a heady place they had never been, the scars of the Whitsitt years started to disappear. "It's like liberation day there," one former executive said the day Whitsitt was fired.

Never could he have known just how much it was.