Seahawks Shine Under Top Brass
President's Firing Clears the Air for Once Divided Team

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 11, 2006

SEATTLE -- Bob Whitsitt was a basketball man, which must have seemed odd to the people who worked at the Seattle Seahawks' headquarters when he arrived in 1997. But he was Paul Allen's designated sports mastermind and Allen was the world's seventh-richest man as well as the determined new owner of the franchise, which made him the best hope the Seahawks had.

Without Whitsitt, there was no Allen. And without Allen the Seahawks would probably have been sold and moved to Houston, San Antonio or some other city desperate for a team. So they accepted the basketball interloper, crossed their fingers and prayed for the best. Only to find the next eight years would be worse than anyone imagined.

Whitsitt set up an office at the team's headquarters in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland and ruled with a force that shocked everyone. While only in the office half the time because he was also president and general manager of Allen's basketball team, the Portland Trail Blazers, Whitsitt did away with the marketing department and the ticketing people. Down came photos of the franchise's most famous men -- Hall of Fame wide receiver Steve Largent and Chuck Knox, the team's only playoff coach other than Mike Holmgren. There would be a new history, a new regime and it would be run by Whitsitt.

When in 2002, Holmgren agreed to give up his role as general manager to concentrate on coaching full-time, Whitsitt moved permanently to Seattle and pulled a move straight from Pat Riley's playbook: He put himself in charge of all player moves in a move that generated so much animosity around the franchise that it almost came apart last winter.

"We were dysfunctional, a house divided," said one team employee who asked not to be identified so as not to create further acrimony. "It was unbelievable, much of it emanated from one man and one office."

Then something unexpected happened one year ago to the day of this Saturday's playoff game with the Redskins. Whitsitt was fired.

It came as a surprise because Allen was seen as stretched so thin with the biotech and multimedia facets of his $21 billion empire that he wouldn't be comfortable cutting ties with the man who ran his sports operations. But the moment he did, one of the most tumultuous franchises in the league suddenly exhaled.

"There was the most amazing group of assets here," said Tod Leiweke, the Seahawks' chief executive. "You had an owner who was committed and did it in his home town, we had a stadium he built that was built right. The last piece you needed was a unified organization."

That the Seahawks were not. In the days before Whitsitt's firing, it had become clear that Holmgren had so tired of his dealings with the de facto general manager from the NBA that he was going to quit unless a change was made. At the same time, team executives realized that Matt Hasselbeck, the quarterback Holmgren had groomed into the team's leader, was going to leave as a free agent if Whitsitt stayed.

The firing changed all that. Both NFL sources and sports executives in Seattle say Leiweke, hired in 2003 to stabilize the team's business operation, was the one who finally convinced Allen that Whitsitt had to go. While Leiweke refused to discuss Whitsitt, there was instantly a new joy around the team offices. The tension of the previous several seasons had disappeared overnight.

And it has a lot to do with the difference between the Seahawks' underachieving records the last couple of years and this season's 13-3.

"I don't think you get to [13-3] unless you have everyone pulling in the same direction," Leiweke said. "This isn't a widget business, it's a people business."

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.