Seattle Seahawks - Franchise History

Franchise History

On June 15, 1972, Seattle Professional Football Inc., a group of Seattle business and community leaders, announced its intention to acquire an NFL franchise for the city of Seattle, WA. Around two years later on June 4, 1974, the NFL gave the city an expansion franchise. On December 5, 1974, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the official signing of the franchise agreement by Lloyd W. Nordstrom, representing the Nordstrom family as majority partners for the consortium. Nordstrom died of a heart attack before the Seahawks played their first game.

On March 5, 1975, John Thompson, former Executive Director of the NFL Management Council and a former Washington Husky executive, was hired as the general manager of the currently unnamed team. The team was originally going to be called the Seattle Kings, but the name was dropped. Instead, the name Seattle Seahawks ("Seahawk", another name for Osprey) was selected on June 17, 1975 after a public naming contest which drew more than 20,000 entries and over 1,700 different names. The name "Seahawks" was submitted by Joseph P. Wanner, Mary Hoolahan and Tom Barnum, among others. Thompson recruited and hired Jack Patera, a Minnesota Vikings assistant coach, to be the first head coach of the Seahawks. Patera was introduced as the new head coach at a press conference on January 3, 1976. The expansion draft was held March 30–31, 1976, with Seattle and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers alternating picks for rounds selecting unprotected players from the other 26 teams in the league. The Seahawks were awarded the 2nd overall pick in the 1976 draft, a pick they used on defensive tackle Steve Niehaus. The team took the field for the first time on August 1, 1976 in a pre-season game against the San Francisco 49ers in the then newly constructed Kingdome.

The Seahawks are the only NFL team to switch conferences twice in the post-merger era. The franchise began play in 1976 in the NFC West division but switched conferences with the Buccaneers after one season and joined the AFC West. This realignment was dictated by the league as part of the 1976 expansion plan, so that both expansion teams could play each other twice and every other NFL franchise once during their first two seasons. In 2002, the Seahawks were returned to the NFC West as part of an NFL realignment plan that gave each conference four balanced divisions of four teams each. This was done after the Houston Texans were added as the thirty-second team. This realignment restored the AFC West to its initial post-merger roster of original AFL teams Denver, San Diego, Kansas City, and Oakland.

Seattle has won seven division titles in their franchise history: the 1988 and 1999 AFC West titles, and the 2004–2007 and 2010 NFC West titles. They won the NFC Championship Game in 2005, and went on to lose in Super Bowl XL against the Pittsburgh Steelers (though it was not without controversy as NFL Films has Super Bowl XL at number 8 on its top ten list of controversial calls). Before 2005, Seattle had the longest drought of playoff victories of any NFL team, dating back to the 1984 season. That drought was ended with a 20–10 win over the Washington Redskins in the 2005 playoffs. The all-time Seahawks playoff record is 8-11.

As a tribute to the raucous fans that made the Kingdome the loudest stadium in the NFL the Seahawks retired the number 12 on December 15, 1984. Since then #12 Jerseys have been sold by the team and worn by Seahawk fans, often with the name "Fan" on the back. The Seahawks also have a ceremony before each home game where a flag bearing the #12 is raised by a prominent individual. In the 2005 season the fans were again making a difference in games and were recognized with the presentation of a special game ball for their efforts in a game against the New York Giants, a game in which the Giants committed 11 false start penalties in large part because of the crowd noise.

The team's use of the phrase "12th Man" was in a legal limbo for a while between the 2005 and 2006 seasons when Texas A&M University sued the team for trademark infringement. Before going to trial, both parties settled out of court with Seattle agreeing to acknowledge ownership rights to the 12th Man slogan to A&M. In return the Seahawks were allowed to continue to use the phrase.

Starting in the 1998 season, Blitz has been the Seahawks' official mascot. In the 2003 and 2004 seasons, a hawk named Faith would fly around the stadium just before the team came out of the tunnel. However, because of her relative small size and an inability to be trained to lead the team out of a tunnel, Faith was replaced by a augur hawk named Taima before the start of the 2005 season. Taima started leading the team out of the tunnel in September 2006. Beginning in 2004, the Seahawks introduced their drum line, the Blue Thunder. The group plays at every home game as well as over 100 events in the Seattle community.

In the 2010 NFL season, the Seahawks made history by making it into the playoffs despite having a 7-9 record. The reason that they managed to do so was because they had the best record in the worst division at the time (Seahawks 7-9, Rams 7-9, 49ers 6-10, Cardinals 5-11) and won the decisive season finale against the Rams. In the playoffs, the Seahawks won in their first game against the then-defending Super Bowl champs, the New Orleans Saints, 41-36. The Seahawks made even more history during the game with Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard run, breaking 7 or so tackles, to clinch the victory. It even made the crowd cheer so loudly that they registered on a nearby seismometer from the vibrations of the sound. The Seahawks lost to the Bears in their second game, 35-24.